It wasn’t intentional. I started out my career as an employment lawyer, working in city law firms. I later moved in-house to run Salesforce’s EMEA employment law team, then later took a lateral move into our Employee Success (Salesforce’s name for HR) Business Partnering team. My past experience gave me a really solid grounding for the role. HR professionals have always been my client group so I very much feel at home in this professional community. Ultimately, I care about people and, given we spend so much of our lives at work, it feels like a gift to make that a better and more fulfilling experience for people.

Creating a welcoming company culture is of paramount importance to any successful organisation. Not only does a positive organisational culture help to attract and recruit the best possible talent, but it can also play a crucial role in retaining employees too. This chimes with data from project management firm Teamstage, which found that 46% of jobseekers believe that ‘culture’ is one of the deciding factors in whether or not they take a job. Additional statistics from jobs board BuiltIn found that 47% of active job candidates cited ‘company culture’ as their main motivation for finding a new role.
One employer that appears to be acutely aware of the benefits that a good company culture can bring is Salesforce. In 2022, the San Francisco-headquartered software firm ranked highly in Glassdoor’s 'Top 10 Best Places to Work in the UK' list, as well as appearing highly on the rankings in France, Germany, U.S. and Canada too, with culture being a key factor in this accolade. Working as the Vice President of Employee Success at Salesforce, Jenny Shiers, has an important role to play in carving out and maintaining a culture that employees and prospective talent want to be part of.
In this exclusive interview with myGrapevine magazine, Shiers – who has held several roles at Salesforce since joining in 2011 – sheds light on the keys to creating an outstanding culture, which she said is “ultimately about letting your employees guide you”, and also discusses her involvement in creating this award-winning culture.