Salesforce employees respond to CEO Marc Benioff’s insensitive ICE comment. Here’s what HR needs to know.

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Over 1,400 Salesforce employees signed a letter last week demanding that CEO Marc Benioff cease business operations with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sources told CNBC.

“We are deeply troubled by recent press reports describing Salesforce pitches of AI technology to [ICE] to help the agency ‘expeditiously’ hire 10,000 new agents and vet tip-line reports,” the letter said, according to CNBC. The letter was drafted after Benioff “joked” to international employees at a Salesforce leadership event in Las Vegas that “ICE agents were in the building monitoring them,” WIRED reported.

Benioff’s remark “landed in the context where immigration enforcement is not an abstract idea. There are some employees really living with it…as a risk, fear, or family impact, and that makes the ‘humor’ function sort of as a power signal, not a punch line,” Christine Haskell, managing director at advisory firm Dative.works and former senior director of data culture and literacy at Salesforce, told HR Brew.

“The CEO’s words set an emotional weather climate, and when the weather is threat adjacent, even in a joke, it tells employees that leadership is willing to treat that lightly,” Haskell said.

This isn’t the first time Salesforce employees have spoken out against the US government’s forceful immigration measures. Employee petitions started circulating in October urging Salesforce to cut ties with ICE and stop the National Guard from deploying troops to San Francisco, where the company is headquartered.

Salesforce did not respond to HR Brew’s request for comment by the time of publication.

What’s happening? For starters, Benioff has a track record of controversial and off-putting comments. “You’ve got a CEO who’s kind of living his truth, and we act like we’re shocked, but this has been the case the entire time,” Haskell said.

Patrick Riccards, crisis communications expert and CEO of the Driving Force Institute, agreed. “Anybody who’s followed [Benioff] should know this. This is no surprise. This is the sort of thing he’s been doing for 20 some years. He’s always spoken his mind,” he told HR Brew. But now, employees’ expectations—of Benioff and corporate CEOs—are changing.

“You’ve got a far greater threat in terms of your own employees,” Riccards said. “You’ve invested so much time and effort in recruiting and training individuals. You bring folks over from overseas with visas…When you start making these flipping comments, you shouldn’t be surprised that your own workforce is ready to rebel against you.”

Employee expectations have changed. Employees are likely hoping that Salesforce leadership “will take responsibility for the harm” that comments, like Benioff’s, can cause, “and protect the people who feel exposed and change anything so that it doesn’t happen again,” Haskell said.

Many employees do not feel a sense of loyalty to their employer, Riccards said, so if their employer makes a misstep, they may not be afraid “to be public with their frustrations. They want this to be a discussion. This is no longer about their jobs. This is about larger issues.”

“They either want their employers to behave better, or they want their employers to be publicly punished,” Riccards said. “Whether it be from bad headlines, or whether it be from drops in sales and loss of contracts, they want them to be punished for these sorts of political speeches that are unnecessary and, quite frankly, are not central to the mission of the organization.”

What can HR do? Companies shouldn’t sweep these situations under the rug, Haskell said, or issue vague statements in an attempt to move on. “That usually backfires internally, and that’s happened many times, because it reads as managing the story rather than repairing the trust,” she said. “HR’s job is the actual repair.”

HR pros can set clear expectations for executives’ behavior, provide channels for employees to speak without retaliation, and issue guidance for how managers can discuss these situations with employees, Haskell said. The best course of action “isn’t a perfect statement,” she added. “It’s a plan for what employees can point to and say, ‘They heard us. They protected us. Something is different now.’”

While HR pros are obligated to protect the business, Riccards said, sometimes through non-disclosure and confidentiality agreements and reminders of the risks associated with speaking out, some employees “don’t care” about those risks.

“The sorts of threats and warnings that HR has traditionally given are going to fall on deaf ears, and I would like to believe that this provides us an opportunity where HR is going to have to actually start listening to their employees,” he said. “[Employees] are coming to them more for more than just a paycheck…They are coming to companies that they believe that they are morally connected to.”