Dana Gardner: Hi, this
is Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
 |
| Gardner |
Businesses around the globe
now face uncharted
waters when it comes to planning the new normal for where and how their
employees return to work. The complex maze of risk factors, precautions, constantly
changing pandemic impacts -- and the need for boosting employee satisfaction
and productivity -- are proving a daunting challenge.
Stay with us here as we
explore how companies can make better decisions and develop adept policies on
where and how to work for safety, peace of mind, and economic recovery.
Here to share their recent
findings and chart new ways to think about working through a pandemic are Donna Kimmel, Executive
Vice President and Chief People Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Donna.
Donna Kimmel: Hi,
there, Dana. Thanks for having me.
Gardner: We’re also here with Tony Gomes, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Tony.
Tony Gomes: Hey,
Dana, great to be with you.
Gardner: Donna,
these are some of the most difficult decisions businesses and workers have faced
when it comes to physically going to work. Workers are not only concerned for themselves;
they are worried about the impacts on their families and communities. Businesses,
of course, are facing unprecedented change in how they manage their people and
processes.
So even though there are few
precedents -- and we’re really only in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic --
how has Citrix begun to develop guidelines for you and your customers for an acceptable
return to work.
Move forward with values
Kimmel: It
really starts with a foundation that’s incredibly important to Tony, me, and our
leadership team. It starts with our
values and culture. Who are we? How do we operate? What’s important to us?
Because that enables us to frame the responses to everything we do. As you
indicated, this is a daunting task -- and it’s a humbling task.
 |
| Kimmel |
When we focus on our culture
and our values -- putting our people, their health, and their safety first -- that
enables us to focus on business
continuity and ultimately our customers and communities. Without that focus
on values we wouldn’t be able to make as easily the decisions we’re making. We
also realized as a part of this that there are no easy answers and no one-size-fits-all
solutions.
We recognized that creating a
framework that we utilize around the world has to be adopted based on the various
sites, locations, and business needs across our organization. And, as we’ve
acknowledged in the past, we also realized that this really means, it “takes a
village.”
The number of employees
partnering with us across multiple disciplines in the organization is
tremendous. We have partnership not only from legal and human resources (HR),
but also our finance organization, IT, real estate and facilities, our global
risk team, procurement, communications, our travel organization, and all of our
functional leaders and site leaders. It’s a tremendous effort to put this
together, to create what we believe is the right thing to do -- in terms of
managing the health and safety of our employees -- as we bring them back into
the workforce.
Gomes: Yes, we’ve
tapped the entire Citrix global organization for talent. And we have found two
things. One, when it comes to going through this, be open to innovation and
answers from all parts of the organization.
For example, our sites in the
Asia-Pacific region that have been dealing the longest with COVID-19 and are in
the process of returning to the office, they have been innovative. They are
teaching the rest of our site leaders the best ways to go about reopening their
sites. So even as the corporate leaders are here in the US, we’re learning an
awful lot from our colleagues on the ground in the Asia-Pacific region.
Two, be aware that this process
is going to call upon you to have skills on your team that you may not have had
on your team before. So that means experts on business continuity, for example,
but also medical experts.
One of the decisions Donna and
I made early on is that we needed to bring medical expertise to our team.
Donna, through her relationships and her team, along with a top-notch benefits
consultant, found great medical resources and expertise for us to rely on. That’s
an example of calling upon new talents, and it’s causing us to look for
innovation in every corner of the organization.
Gardner: Citrix
has conducted some recent
studies that help us understand where the employees are coming from. Tell
us about the state of their thinking right now.
Get comfortable to get to work
Kimmel: Citrix
did a study with one poll of about 2,000 US workers. We found that at least 67
percent of the respondents did not
feel comfortable returning to the office for at least one month.
And in examining the sentiment
of what it would take for them to feel comfortable coming back into the office,
some 51 percent indicated that there has to be testing and screening. Another
46 percent prefer to wait until a [novel coronavirus] vaccine is ready. And 82
percent were looking for some kind of contact-tracing to make sure that we
could at least connect with other individuals if there was an issue.
This was an external study, but
as we talk with our own employees -- our own surveys of roundtable discussions,
group dialogues, and feedback we get from our managers -- we are finding
similar results. Many of our employees, though they would like to be able to
come back to the office, recognize that coming back immediately, post-COVID-19,
is not going to be to the same office that they left. We recognize that we need
to make sure we’re creating a safe environment, one conducive for them to be
productive in the office.
Gardner: Tony,
what jumped out to you as interesting and telling in these recent findings?
Gomes: Donna
hit on it, which is how aligned the results of this external study are coming
in with our own experiences; what we’re listening for and hearing from our global
workforce and what our own internal surveys are telling us.
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| Gomes |
We’ve been taking that
feedback and building that into the way we’re approaching the reopening
decision-making process.
For example, we know that
employees are concerned about whether the cities, states, and countries they
live and work in have adequate testing. Is there adequate contact-tracing? Are
the medical facilities capable of supporting COVID-19 patients in a non-crisis
mode?
So we built all of that into
our decision-making. Every time we analyze whether an office or campus is ready
for a phased reopening approach, we first look for those factors, along with
governmental lifting and governmental lockdown orders.
We’re trying to be clear, communicating
with employees that, “Hey, we are looking at all of this.” In that way it
becomes a feedback loop. We hear the concern. We build the concern into our
processes. We communicate back to the employees that our decisions are being
made on the basis of what they express to us and are concerned about.
But it’s really amazing to see
the alignment of the external study and what we’re hearing internally.
Kimmel: What
Tony is acknowledging is right-on about understanding the concerns of our
employees. They want to have a sense of confidence that the setup of the office
will be appropriate for them.
We’re also trying to provide
choice to our employees. Even as we’ll be looking at the critical roles that
need to come back, we want to make sure that employees have the opportunity to
self-select in terms of understanding what it will be like to work in the
office in that environment.
We also recognize that some
people are just nervous and don’t feel comfortable. So we’re trying to put our
employees’ minds at ease by providing them a good look at what it will be like --
and feel like -- to come back to the office. They should know the safety and
security that we’re putting into place on their behalf, but still also
providing them with a feeling of comfort to make a decision on what they think
is right based on their own circumstances.
Gardner: It
strikes me that organizations, while planning, need to also stay agile, to be
flexible, and perhaps recognize that being able to react is more important than
coming up with the final answer quickly. Is that your understanding as well,
that organizations need to come up with new ways of being able to adapt rapidly
and do whatever the changing circumstances require?
Cross-train your functionality
Gomes:
Absolutely, Dana. What Donna and I have tried to do is build a strong
cross-functional team that has a lot of capacity across all of the functional
areas. Then we try to create decision-making frameworks from the top down.
We then set some basic
planning assumptions, or answer some of the big questions, especially in terms
of the level of care that we’re going to provide to each employee across the
globe. Those include areas such as social distancing, personal
protective equipment (PPE), things like that, that we’re going to make sure
that every employee has across the globe.
But
then it’s a different decision based on how that gets implemented at each and
every site, when, where, and who leads. Who has a bigger or smaller team, and how
do they influence or control the process? How much support from corporate
headquarters versus local initiatives are taken?
Those are very different from
site-to-site, along with the conditions they are responding to. The public
health conditions are dynamic and different in every location -- and they are constantly
changing. And that’s where you need to give your teams the ability to respond
and foster that active-response capacity.
Kimmel: We’ve
worked really hard to make sure that we’re making faster, timely decisions, but
we also recognize that we may not have all the information. We’ve done a lot of
digging, a lot of research, and have great information. We’re very transparent
with our employees in terms of where we are, what information we have at the
time that we’re making the decisions, and we recognize that because it’s moving
so quickly we may have to adapt those decisions.
As Tony indicated, that can be
based on a site, a region, a country, or medical circumstances and new medical information.
So, again, it goes back to our ability to live our values and what’s important
to us. That includes transparency of decisions, of bringing employees along on
the journey so that they understand how and why we’ve arrived at those
decisions. And then when we need to shift them, they will understand why we’ve
made a shift.
One of the positive byproducts
or outcomes of this situation is being able to pivot to make good and fast
decisions and being transparent about where and why we need to make them so
that we can continue to pivot if necessary.
One of the positive byproducts of the situation is being able to pivot to make good and fast decisions and being transparent about where and why we need to make them so that we can continue to pivot if necessary.
Gardner: Of
course, some of those big decisions initially meant having more people than
ever working remotely and from their homes. A lot of business executives weren’t
always on board with that. Now that we’ve gone through it, what have we learned?
Are people able to get their
work done? They seem to be cautious about wanting to come back without the
proper precautions in place. But even if we continue to work remotely, the work
seems to be getting done.
Donna, what’s your impression about
letting people continue to work at home? Has that been okay at Citrix?
Work from home, the office, or hybrid
Kimmel: Tony
and I and the rest of the leadership team certainly recognized as we were all
thrust into this that we would be 100 percent work-from-home (WFH). We all
realized and learned very quickly that there were very few, if any, roles that
were so critical that they had to be done in the office.
Because remote work is part of
the Citrix brand, we were able to enable employees to work securely and access
their information from anywhere, anytime. We recognized, all of a sudden, that
we were capable of doing that in more areas than we had recognized.
But beyond COVID, post-vaccines,
as we think about our business continuity going forward, I do think that we
will be moving into, very purposefully, a more hybrid work arrangement. That
means new, innovative, in-office opportunities because we still want people to
be working face-to-face and have those in-person sort of collisions, as we call
them. Those you can’t do at all or they are harder to do on videoconferencing.
But there can be a new balance
between in-office and remote work -- and fine-tuning our own practices – that
will enable us to be as effective as possible in both environments.
So, no doubt, we have already
started to undertake that as a post-COVID approach. We are asking what it will look
like for us, and then how do we then make sure from a philosophical and a
strategy perspective that the right practices are put into place to enable it.
This has been a big, forced
experiment. We looked at it and said, “Wow, we did it. We’ve done really well.
We’ve been very fortunate.”
Home is where the productivity is
Gomes: Donna’s
team has designed some great surveys with great participation across the global
workforce. It’s revealed that a very high percentage of our employees feel as
productive -- if not even more productive -- working from home rather than
working from the office.
And the thing is, when you
peel back the onion and you look at specific teams and specific locations, and what
they can accomplish through this, it’s just really amazing.
For example, Donna and I, earlier this morning, were on a videoconference with our site leadership team in Bangalore, India where we have our second-largest office, which has quite a few functions. That campus represents all of the Citrix functions, spread across a number of buildings. We were looking at detailed information about the productivity of our product engineering teams over their last agile planning interval, their continuous integration interval, and how they are planning for their next interval.
We looked at information
coming from our order processing team in Bangalore and also from our support
team. And what we saw is increased productivity across those teams. We’re
looking at not just anecdotal information, but objective data showing that more
co-checks occurred, fewer bugs, and more on-time delivery of new functionality
occurred within the interval that we had just completed.
We are just tremendously proud
of what our teams are accomplishing during this time of global, personal,
family, and societal stress. But there is something more here. Donna has put her
finger on it, which is there is a way to drive increased productivity by
creating these environments where more people can work from home.
So there are challenges we
need to address. But we have also uncovered something I think here that’s pretty
powerful -- and we are seeing it, not just anecdotally, but through actual
data.
Gardner: As we
query more companies about their productivity over the past few months, we will
probably see more instances where working at home has actually been a benefit.
I know from the employee
perspective that many people feel that they save money and time by not
commuting. They are not paying for transportation. They have more of a work
balance with their lives. They have more control, in a sense, over their lives.
The technology has been there
for some time, Donna, to allow this. It was really a cultural hurdle we had to
overcome that the pandemic has endowed us with. Not that a pandemic is a good thing,
but the results allow us to test models that now show how technology and
processes can allow for higher productivity when working from home.
Will what you are experiencing
at Citrix follow through to other companies?
Kimmel: Oh, yes,
definitely. I have been on a number of calls with my peers at other companies.
Everyone is talking about what’s next and how they design this into their
organizations.
We recognize all of the
benefits, Dana, that you just indicated. We recognize that those benefits are
things that we want to be able to capture. New employees coming into the workforce,
the Gen Zs and the Millennials, are looking for flexibility to be able to
balance that work and life and integrate it in a more productive way for
themselves. Part of that is a bit of a push in terms of what we are hearing
from employees.
It also enables us to tap into
new talent pools. Folks that may not live near a particular office but have
tremendous skills that they can offer. There are those who may have varying
disabilities who may not be able to commute or don’t live near offices. There
are a number of ways for us to tap into more workers that have the skills that
we are looking for who don’t actually live in near offices. So again, all of
that I think is quite helpful to us.
Legal lessons for employers
Gardner: Tony,
what are some of the legal implications if we have a voluntary return to work?
What does that mean for companies? Are there issues about not being able to
force people, or not being able to fire them, or flexibly manage them?
Gomes: One
of things that we have seen, Dana, during this pandemic, is significant changes
in employee relations laws around the globe. This is not just in the United
States, but everywhere. Governments are trying to both protect employees,
preserve jobs, and provide guidance to employers to clarify how existing legal
requirements apply in this pandemic.
For example, here in the
United States both the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) have put out guidelines that
address things such as PPE. What criteria do employers need to meet when they
are providing PPE to employees? How do you work within the Americans
with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements when offering employees the
ability to come back to the office? How do you permit them to opt out without
calling them out, without highlighting that they may have an underlying medical
condition that you as an employer are obligated to maintain as confidential and
allow the employee to keep confidential?
Just recently a new bill was
introduced in the US Congress to try
and address these issues and provide employees greater protection, and provide
employers more certainty, especially in areas such as the digital processing
and storage of personal health information through things such as contact-tracing
apps.
Gardner: Donna,
we have only been at this for a few months, adjusting to this new world, this
new normal. What have we learned about what works and what doesn’t work?
Is there anything that jumps
out to you that says this is a definite thing you want to do – or something you
should probably avoid -- when it comes to managing the work-balance new normal?
Place trust in the new normal
Kimmel: One,
we learned that this can be done. That shifts the mental models that some had
come into, that for any employment engagement you would prefer to have face-to-face-only
interactions. And so this taught us something.
It also helped us build trust
in each other, and trust in leadership, because we continue to make decisions
based on our values. We have been very transparent with employees, with phenomenal
amounts of communication we put out there -- two-way, with high empathy, and
building better relationships. That also means better collaboration and
relationship-building, not only between team members, but between managers and
employees. It has been a really strong outcome.
It helped us build trust in each other and in leadership because we continue to make decisions based on our values. We have been very transparent with employees, with high empathy, and building better relationships. That also means better collaboration. It has been a really strong outcome.
And again, that’s part of the
empathy, the opportunity for empathy, as you learn more about each other’s families.
You are meeting them as they run by on the video. You are hearing about the
struggles that people face. And so managers, employees, and team members are
working with each other to help mitigate those as much as possible.
Those are some big aspects of
what we have learned. And, as I mentioned earlier, we have benefitted from our
ability to make decisions faster, acknowledging various risks, and using the
detailed information such as what Tony’s team brings to the table to help us
make good decisions at any given time. Those are some of the benefits and positive
outcomes we have seen.
The challenges are when we go
into the post-COVID-19 phase, we recognize that children may be back to school.
Caregiving resources may be in place, so we may not be dealing with as many of
those challenges. But we recognize there is sometimes still isolation and
loneliness that can arise from working remotely.
People are human. We are
creatures who want to be near each other and with each other. So we still need
to find that balance to make sure everyone feels like they are included,
involved, and contributing to the success of the organization. We must increase
and improve our managers’ ability to lead productively in this environment. I
think that is also really important.
And we must look for ways to
drive collaboration, not only when people come back into the office -- because
we know how to do that well -- but how do we have the right technology tools to
enable us to collaborate well while we are away – from white-boarding
techniques and things that enable us to collaborate even more from a WFH and remote
perspective.
So it will be about the fine-tuning
of enabling success, stronger success, more impactful success in that
environment.
Gardner: Tony,
what do you see as things that are working and maybe some things that are not
that people should be thinking about?
Level-up by listening to people
Gomes: One
of the things that’s really working is a high level of productivity that we are
seeing -- unexpectedly high – even though about 98 percent of our company has been
working from home for eight weeks-plus. So that’s one.
The other thing that is really
working is our approach to investing in our employees and listening to our
employees. I mean this very tangibly, whether it’s the stipend that we provide
our employees to go out and buy the equipment that they need to more
comfortably and more productively work from home or to support charities and
organizations or small businesses. This is truly tangibly investing in
employees, truly tangibly, in integrated, multichannel ways, listening to the
feedback from employees and processing that, putting that into your processes
and feeding it back to them. That’s really worked.
And again, the proof is in the
high-level productivity and the very high level of satisfaction despite the
very challenging environment. Donna mentioned some of them. One of the bigger
challenges that we see right now is obviously the challenge of employees who
have families, who have childcare, and other family care responsibilities in
the middle of this pandemic while trying to work and many times being even more
productive than they ever have been for us when working in the office.
So again, it’s nice to say we
invest in our employees and we expect our employees to reciprocate, but we are
actually seeing this in action. We have made very tangible investments and we
see it coming back to us.
Mind and body together win the race
On the
other hand, we have to be really careful about a couple of things. One, this is
a long-term game, an ultramarathon, where we are only in the first quarter, if
you will. It feels like we should be down at the two-minute warning, but we are
really in the first quarter of this game. We have a long way to go before we
get to viable therapeutics and viable, widely available effective vaccines that
will allow us to truly come back to the work and social life we had before this
crisis. So we have got to be prepared mentally to run this ultramarathon, and
we have to help and coach our teams to have that mindset.
View this as a long-term
challenge and pay attention to the mental health of your employees and teams as
much as you are paying attention to their physical health.
Kimmel: It’s
been incredibly important for us to focus on mental health for our employees. We
have tried to pull together as many resources as possible, not only for our
employees but for our managers who tend to be in the squeeze point, because
they themselves may be experiencing some of these same issues and pressures.
And
then they also carry that caring sense of responsibility for their employees,
which adds to the pressure. So, for us, paying attention to that and making
sure we have the right resources is really important to our strategy. I can’t agree
more, this is absolutely a marathon, not a sprint.
Gardner: I’m
afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how businesses around the globe are planning for
the new normal for where and how their employees work. And we have learned how
companies can make better decisions and develop adept policies on where and how
to work safely with peace of mind and with economic recovery throughout this
pandemic.
So a big thank you to our
guests, Donna Kimmel, Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at
Citrix. Thank you so much, Donna.
Kimmel: Thank
you, Dana. It’s great to be here.
Gardner: And we have also been with Tony Gomes, Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Citrix. Thank you, Tony.
Gomes: Thank
you, Dana. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Gardner: And a
big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect business
continuity innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening.
Please pass this along to your business community and do come back next time.
Transcript of a discussion on making
better decisions and creating adept policies that usher in an acceptable future
of work and economic recovery. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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