Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hello, I’m Ron Kaufman. Co-founder of Up Your Service. We help organizations all over the world build cultures of excellence in service. In this book Uplifting Service, I write about 89 different companies that lead by example in delivering great service and building strong cultures of service. I recently became familiar with another company that I think is worth telling you about.

I was a guest at Dreamforce, the annual gathering in San Francisco of Salesforce customers, partners and employees. It’s what they call their ‘Ohana’. That’s a Hawaiian term for extended family. There were thousands of presentations over four days on data and devices and technology. You can watch many of these now online for free. But what really stood out for me is how Salesforce is an example of the growing value of ethical values. This means a lot to me because our definition of service is taking action to create value for someone else, and service excellence is taking the next step to create more value for someone else you care about.

Let me be clear. I’m not saying that Salesforce is perfect. But what they’re doing is working. It’s working in their growth and also in their appeal as an employer. That’s important in the world today. So, I do think it’s worth taking a moment for me to share with you about what Salesforce is doing and for you to think about how what they’re doing might be applied where you work. 

When Salesforce was created, the two co-founders Parker Harris and Marc Benioff were very intentional about the culture that they wanted to create. I got to meet Parker at a panel discussion about how they keep the culture strong while also growing really fast. Parker put it, Our ability to walk our values, not just talk about them. Let me show you some of what I saw. 

The first value at sales is trust. Trust is not a fact. Trust is an opinion that someone has about your competence, your reliability, and your care. Competence that’s your ability to do things, solve problems and come up with solutions. Reliability is doing what you say you’re going to do. But care is in another dimension. Care is about your commitment to someone else’s well-being now and into the future. And this is where Salesforce puts ethics into the equation. As artificial intelligence grows algorithms are going to drive decisions more and more about people like you and me. The problem is that the data used to create algorithms today reflects our standards and our decisions from the past and that may not be what we want more of in the future. So Salesforce is asking itself, “How do we create the world we want and not just more of the world that we already have”? But let’s be clear. This is a huge ethical question because who gets to decide what is the world that we want. To earn your trust in answering this question Salesforce has created an Office of the ethical and humane use of technology to ask over and over and over again. Is what we are doing today ethical and humane? In his opening keynote speech, Marc Benioff said, “we all have to ask that question” and then he challenged. He said every company and every CEO had better be ready to answer it with their values. 

The second value at Salesforce is Customer success. This means helping customers take better care of their customers. But at Salesforce that also means taking better care of their employees and the communities where their customers live and work. I’ll give you an example. At salesforce.com you’ll find a lot of information about the commercial enterprise. But at Salesforce org is where you will find the company’s commitment to social enterprise. One of the services here is called philanthropy cloud. What does it do? It matches people with the projects and causes that they care about. Now, this is good for everybody. The people who want to give time, talent, money, resources and organizations all around the world that want and need the help. That’s focusing on customer success but way beyond the budget. It’s focusing on the real bottom line which is where and how we actually live and grow together. 

The third value at Salesforce is innovation. Now invention is when you come up with a new idea. But innovation is when the idea is successfully adopted in real community practice. One example of ethical innovation was at the Dreamforce event itself. Now you have to understand that a hundred and ninety-seven thousand people flooded into San Francisco from all over the world for four days for this event and the entire program was decarbonized. What does that mean? Salesforce used recycling and offsets to achieve a complete carbon neutral event. And then taking this even further they publicly announced a commitment to 100% use of renewable energy by 2022. How many other companies do you know that have publicly declared their commitment to a goal like that? 

The fourth value at Salesforce is equality and this commitment to equality shows up in many ways. Equal pay, equal rights, equal opportunity. One example: Salesforce does this by making online learning available to anyone anywhere in the world with a site called trailhead. Of course, this does help Salesforce to grow and they are one of the fastest-growing companies around. But from a values standpoint, this open access to education gives everyone an equal opportunity to develop themselves, build skills, get a better job and become a more valuable member of their family and their community. Go ahead and check it out. You’ll find free courses on communication, public speaking, storytelling, recognizing unconscious bias, leadership, management, interviewing skills and you’ll find a lot about how to use Salesforce. 

Now I’m not saying that Salesforce always gets it right and neither are they. Every company is going to make mistakes. What’s ethical is being able to say so and then fix it. Mark did that in the keynote. When he said we’re not always gonna get it right. Sometimes you have to take a big 2×4 and hit me over the head. Bravo to you Mark for being so open about this with your customers, partners and employees from all over the world. Thanks for being the role model that you are. So what happens when a company does get it wrong? Then the ethical thing to do is to be open and transparent about it. Create a safe environment for people to speak up and build a culture where when your people see something they know they can say something. 

Now, what about the economic value of all these four ethical values I mean after all Salesforce is a company. They’ve got employees, customers and shareholders. Well from an employee perspective, Salesforce is now ranked number one on Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For Survey and I’m not surprised. 93% of their employees say, “I feel good about the ways we contribute to the community”.  ninety-six per cent say management is honest and ethical in our business practices. and ninety-six per cent say I’m proud to tell others that I work here. From a customer perspective, 95 per cent say they’re more likely to be loyal to a company they know they can trust. And from a shareholder perspective, the Salesforce stock has been one of the strongest performers in the technology sector for years. 

Is Salesforce taking values to a higher level or are these ethical values taking Salesforce to a higher level? And that’s really the whole point. These are connected for a company like this and a company like yours. Thank you for watching this and for thinking about the growing value of ethical values where you work. I look forward to bringing you more about companies and communities that are building a future we can all be proud to share.