The way people work has changed more in 2020 than the previous 10 years combined -- and that’s saying a lot. Even more than the major technological impacts of cloud, mobile, and big data, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated and deepened global behavioral shifts.
The ways that people think about where and how to work may never be the same, and new technology alone could not have made such a rapid impact.
So now is the time to take advantage of a perhaps once-in-a-lifetime disruption for the better. Steps can be taken to make sure that such a sea change comes less with a price and more with a broad boon -- to both workers and businesses.
The next BriefingsDirect work strategies panel discussion explores research into the future of work and how unprecedented innovation could very well mean a doubling of overall productivity in the coming years.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
We’re joined by a panel to hear insights on how a remote-first strategy leads to a reinvention of work expectations and payoffs. Please welcoming our guests, Jeff Vincent, Chief Executive Officer at Lucid Technology Services; Ray Wolf, Chief Executive Officer at A2K Partners, and Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tim, you’ve done some new research at Citrix. You’ve looked into what’s going on with the nature of work and a shift from what seems to be from chaos to opportunity. Tell us about the research and why it fosters such optimism.
Minahan: Most of the world has been focused on the here-and-now, with how to get employees home safely, maintain business continuity, and keep employees engaged and productive in a prolonged work-from-home model. Yet we spent the bulk of the last year partnering with Oxford Analytica and Coleman Parkes to survey thousands of business and IT executives and to conduct qualitative interviews with C-level executives, academia, and futurists on what work is going to look like 15 years from now -- in 2035 -- and predict the role that technology will play.
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| Minahan |
Work has no-doubt forever changed. We’re seeing an acceleration of companies embracing new workforce strategies, reaching to pools of talent in remote locales using technology, and opening up access to skill sets that were previously too costly near their office and work hubs.
Now they can access talent anywhere, enabling and elevating the skill sets of all employees by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help them perform as their best employees. They are ensuring that they can embrace entirely new work models, possibly even the Uber-fication of work by tapping into recent retirees, work-from-home parents, and caregivers who had opted-out of the workforce -- not because they didn’t have the skills or expertise that folks needed – but because traditional work models didn’t support their home environment.
We’re seeing an acceleration of companies liberated by the fact that they realize work can happen outside of the office. Many executives across every industry have begun to rethink what the future of work is going to look like when we come out of this pandemic.
Gardner: Tim, one of the things that jumped out at me from your research was a majority feel that technology will make workers at least twice as productive by 2035. Why such a newfound opportunity for higher productivity, which had been fairly flat for quite a while? What has changed in behavior and technology that seems to be breaking us out of the doldrums when it comes to productivity?
Gardner: We’re going to dig into that research more in our discussion. But let’s go to Jeff at Lucid Technology Services. Tell us about Lucid, Jeff, and why a remote-first strategy has been a good fit for you.
Remote service keep SMBs safe
Vincent: Lucid Technology Services delivers what amounts to a fractional chief information officer (CIO) service. Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need CIOs but don’t generally have the working capital to afford a full-time, always-on, and always-there CIO or chief technology officer (CTO). That’s where we fill the gap.
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| Vincent |
Something similar happened in the early 1990s. It was a fad called the Internet and it revolutionized work in ways that could not have been foreseen up to that point in time. We firmly believe that we’re on the precipice of another revolution of work just like then. The technology is mature at this point. We can move forward with it, using things like Citrix.
Gardner: Bringing a CIO-caliber function to SMBs sounds like it would be difficult to scale, if you had to do it in-person. So, by nature, you have been a pioneer in a remote-first strategy. Is it effective? Some people think you can’t be remote and be effective.
Vincent: Well, that’s not what we’ve been finding. This has been an evolution in my business for 20 years now. And the field has grown as the need has grown. Fortunately, the technology has kept pace with it. So, yes, I think we’re very effective.
Previously, let’s say a CPA firm of 15 providers, or a medical firm of three or four doctors with another 10 or so administrative and assistance staff on site all of the time, they had privileged information and data under regulation that needs safeguarding.
Well, if you are Arthur Andersen, a large, national firm, or Kaiser Permanente, or some really large corporation that has an entire team of IT staff on-site, then that isn’t really a problem. But when you’re under 25 to 50 employees, that’s a real problem because even if you were compromised, you wouldn’t necessarily know it.
We leverage monitoring technology, such as next-generation firewalls, and a team of people looking after that network operation center (NOC) and help desk to head those problems off at the pass. If problems do develop, we can catch them when they’re still small. And with such a light, agile team that’s heavy on tech and the infrastructure behind it, a very few people can do a lot of work for a lot of people. That is the secret sauce of our success.
Gardner: Jeff, from your experience, how often is it the CIO who is driving the remote work strategy?
Vincent: I don’t think remote work prior to the pandemic could have been driven from any other any other seat than the CIO/CTO. It’s his or her job. It’s their entire ethos to keep the finger on pulse of technology, where it’s going, and what it’s currently capable of doing.
In my experience, anybody else on the C-suite team has so much else going on. Everybody is wearing multiple hats and doing double-duty. So, the CTO is where that would have been driven.
But now, what I’ve seen in my own business, is that since the pandemic, as the CTO, I’m not generally leading the discussion -- I’m answering the questions. That’s been very exciting and one of the silver linings I’ve seen through this very trying time. We’re not forcing the conversation anymore. We are responding to the questions. I certainly didn’t envision a pandemic shutting down businesses. But clearly, the possibility was there, and it’s been a lot easier conversation [about remote work] to have over the past several months.
The nomadic way of work
Gardner: Ray, tell us about A2K Partners. What do you have in common with Jeff Vincent at Lucid about the perceived value of a remote-first strategy?
Wolf: A2K Partners is a digital transformation company. Our secret sauce is we translate technology into the business applications, outcomes, and impacts that people care about.
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| Wolf |
We focus on work redesign, work orchestration, and employee engagement. We leverage platforms like Citrix for the future of work and for bringing in productivity enhancements to the actual processes of doing work. We ask, what’s the current state? What’s the future state? That’s where we spend a lot of our time.
As for a remote-first strategy, I want to highlight that our company is a nomadic company. We recruit people who want to live and work from anywhere. We think there’s a different mindset there. They are more apt to accept and embrace change. So untethered work is really key.
What we have been seeing with our clients -- and the conversations that we’re having currently today -- is the leaders of every organization, at every level, are trying to figure out how we come out of this pandemic better than when we went in. Some actually feel victims, and we’re encouraging them that this is really an opportunity.
Some statistics from the last three economic downturns: One very interesting one is that companies that started before the downturn in the bottom 20 percent emerged in the top 20 percent after the downturn. And you ask yourself, “How does a mediocre company all of a sudden rise to the top through a crisis?” This is where we’ve been spending time, in figuring out what plays they are running and how to better help them execute on it.
Gardner: Tim, in listening to Jeff and Ray, it strikes me that they look at remote work not as the destination -- but the starting point. Is that what you’re starting to see? Have people reconciled themselves with the notion that a significant portion of their workforce will probably be remote? And how do we use that as a starting point -- and to what?
Minahan: As Jeff said, companies are rethinking their work models in ways they haven’t since Henry Ford. We just did OnePoll research polling with thousands of US-based knowledge workers. Some 47 percent have either relocated out of big metropolitan areas or are in the process of doing that right now. They can primarily because they’ve proven to themselves that they can be productive when not necessarily in the office.
And they’re seeing an opportunity, not just from real estate cost-reduction, but more so from access to talent. If we remember back nine months ago to before the great pandemic, we were having a different discussion. That discussion was the fact that there was a global talent shortage, according to McKinsey, of 95 million medium- to high-skilled workers.
That hasn’t changed. It was exacerbated at that time because we were organized around traditional work-hub models -- where you build an office, build a call center, and you try like heck to hire people from around that area. Of course, if you happen to build in a metropolitan area right down the street from one of your top competitors -- you can see the challenge.
In addition, there was a challenge around attaining the right skillsets to modernize and digitize your businesses. We’re also seeing an acceleration in the need for those skills because, candidly, very few businesses can continue to maintain their physical operations in light of the pandemic. They have had to go digital.
And so, as companies are rethinking all of this, they’re reviewing how to use technology to embrace a much more flexible work model, one that gives access to talent anywhere, just as Ray indicated. I like the nomadic work concept.
Now, how do I use technology to even further raise the skillsets of all of my employees so they perform like the very best. This is where that interesting angle of AI and ML comes in, of being able to offer up the right insights to guide employees to the right next step in a very simple way. At the same time, that approach removes the noise from their day and helps them focus on the tasks they need to get done to be productive. It gives them the space to be creative and innovative and to drive that next level of growth for their company.
Gardner: Jeff, it sounds like the remote work and the future of work that Tim is describing sets us up for a force-multiplier when it comes to addressable markets. And not just addressable markets in terms of your customers, who can be anywhere, but also that your workers can be anywhere. Is that one of the things that will lead to a doubling of productivity?
Workers and customers anywhere
Vincent: Certainly. And the thing about truth is that it’s where you find it. And if it’s true in one area of human operations, it’s going to at least have some application in every other. For example, I live in the Central Valley of California. Because of our climate, the geology, and the way this valley was carved out of the hillside, we have a disproportionately high ability to produce food. So one of the major industries here in the Central Valley is agriculture.
You can’t do what we do here just anywhere because of all those considerations: climate, soil, and rainfall, when it comes. The fact that we have one of the tallest mountain ranges right next to us gives us tons of water, even if it doesn’t rain a lot here in Fresno. But you can’t outsource any of those things. You can’t move any of those things -- but that’s becoming a rarity.
If you focus on a remote-first workplace, you can source talent from anywhere; you can locate your business center anywhere. So you get a much greater recruiting tool both for clientele and for talent.
Another thing that has been driven by this pandemic is that people have been forced to go home, stay there, and work there. Either you’re going to figure out a way to get around the obstacles of not being able to go to the office or you’re going to have to close down, and nobody wants to do that. So they’ve learned to adapt, by and large.
And the benefits that we’re seeing are just manifold. They go into everything. Our business agility is much greater. The human considerations of your team members improve, too. They have had an artificial dichotomy between work responsibilities and home life. Think of a single parent trying to raise a family and put bread on the table.
With a cloud-based workforce, that becomes much less of a problem. You have still got some challenges you’ve got to overcome, but there are fewer of them. I think everybody is reaping the benefits of that because with fewer people needing to be in the office, that means you can have a smaller office. Fewer people on the roads means less environmental impact of moving around and commuting for an hour twice a day.
Gardner: Ray Wolf, what is it about technology that is now enabling these people to be flexible and adaptive? What do you look for in technology platforms to give those people the tools they need?
Do more with less
Wolf: First, let’s talk about the current technology situation. The average worker out there has eight applications and 10 windows open. The way technology is provisioned to some of our remote workers is working against them. We have these technologies for all. Just because you give someone access to a customer relationship management (CRM) system or a human resources (HR) system doesn’t necessarily make them more productive. It doesn’t take into consideration how they like to do work. When you bring on new employees, it leaves it up to the individual to figure out how to get stuff done.
With the new platforms, Citrix Workspace with intelligence, for example, we’re able to take those mundane tasks and lock then into memory muscle through automation. And so, what we do is free-up time and energy using the Citrix platform. Then people can start moving and essentially upscaling, taking on higher cognitive tasks, and building new products and services.
That’s what we love about it. The other side is it’s no code and low code. The key here is just figuring out where to get started and making sure that the workers have their fingerprints on the plan because your worker today knows exactly where the inefficiencies are. They know where the frustration is. So we have a number of use cases that in the matter of six weeks, we were able to unlock almost a day per week worth of productivity gains, of which one of our customers in the sale spaces, a sales vice president, coined the word “proactivity.”
For them, they were taking that one extra day a week and starting to be proactive by pursuing new sales and leads and driving revenue where they just didn’t have the bandwidth before.
Through of our own polling of about 200 executives, we discovered that 50 percent of the companies are scaling down on their resources because they are unsure of the future. And that leaves them with the situation of doing more with less. That’s why the automation platforms are ideal for freeing up time and energy so they can deal with a reduced work force, but still gain the bandwidth to pursue new services and products. Then they can come out and be in that top 20 percent after the pandemic.
Gardner: Tim, I’m hearing Citrix Workspace referred to as an automation platform. How does Workspace not just help people connect, but helps them automate and accelerate productivity?
Keep talent optimized every day
Minahan: Ray put his finger on the pulse of the third dynamic we were seeing pre-pandemic, and it’s only been exacerbated. We talked first about the global shortage of medium- to high-skills talent. But then we talked about the acute shortage of digital skills that those folks need.
The third part is, if you’re lucky enough to have that talent, it’s likely they are very frustrated at work. A recent Gallup poll says 87 percent of employees are disengaged at work, and that’s being exacerbated by all of the things that Ray talked about. We’ve provided these workers with all of these tools, all these different channels, Teams and Slack and the like, and they’re meant to improve their performance in collaboration. But we have reached a tipping point of complexity that really has turned your top talent into task rabbits.
What Citrix does with our digital Workspace technology is it abstracts away all of that complexity. It provides unified access to everything an employee needs to be productive in one experience that travels with them. So, their work environment is this digital workspace -- no matter what device they are on, no matter what location they are at, no matter what work channel they need to navigate across.
The second thing is it wrappers that in security, both secure access on the way in (I call it the bouncer at the front door), as well as ongoing contextual application of security policies. I call that the bodyguard who follows you around the club to make sure you stay out of trouble. And that gives IT the confidence that those employees can indeed work wherever they need to, and from whatever device they need to, with a level of comfort that their company’s information and assets are made secure.
But what gets exciting now is the intelligence components. Infusing this with ML and AI automates away and guides an employee through their work day. It automates away those menial tasks so they can focus on what’s important.
And that’s where folks like A2K come in. They can bring in their intellectual property and understanding of the business processes -- using those low- to no-code tools -- to actually develop extensions to the workspace that meet the needs of individual functions or individual industries and personalize the workspace experience for every individual employee.
Ray mentioned sales force productivity. They are also doing call center optimization. So, very, very discreet solutions that before required users to navigate across multiple different applications but are now handled through a micro app player that simplifies the engagement model for the employee, offering up the right insights and the right tasks at the right time so that they can do their very best work.
Gardner: Jeff Vincent, we have been talking about this in terms of worker productivity. But I’m wondering about leadership productivity. You are the CEO of a company that relies on remote work to a large degree. How do you find that tools like Citrix and remote-first culture works for you as a leader? Do you feel like you can lead a company remotely?
Workspace enhances leadership
Vincent: Absolutely. I’m trying to take a sip out of a fire hose, because everything I am hearing is exactly what we have been seeing -- just put a bit more eloquently and with a bit more data behind it -- for quite a long time now.
Leading a remote team really isn’t any different than leading a team that you look at. I mean, one of the aspects of leadership, as it pertains to this discussion, is having everybody know what is expected of them and when the due date is, enabling them with the tools they need to get the work done on time and on budget, right?
And it allows everybody to take a moment, reflect on where they are, reflect on where they need to be, and then get more surgical with our people on getting there.
Gardner: Ray, also as a CEO, how do you see the intersection of technology, behavior, and culture coming together so that leaders like yourself are the ones going to be twice as productive?
Wolf: This goes to a human capital strategy, where you’re focusing on the numerator. So, the cost of your resources and the type of resource you need fit within a band. That’s the denominator.
The numerator is what productivity you get out of your workforce. There’s a number of things that have to come into play. It’s people, process, culture, and technology -- but not independent or operating in a silo.
And that’s the big opportunity Jeff and Tim are talking about here. Imagine when we start to bring system-level thinking to how we do work both inside and outside of our company. It’s the ecosystem, like hiring Ray Wolf as the individual contributor, yet getting 13 Ray Wolfs; that’s great.
But what happens if we orchestrate the work between finance, HR, the supply chain, and procurement? And then we take it an even bigger step by applying this outside of our company with partners?
We’re really jazzed about that. How did we discover this? Two things. One, I’m an aerospace engineer by first degree, so I saw this come together in complex machines, like jet engines. And then, second, by running a global company, I was spending 80 hours a week trying to reconcile disparate data: One data set says sales were up, another that productivity was up, and then my profit margins go down. I couldn’t figure it out without spending a lot of hours.
And then we started a new way of thinking, which is now accelerated with the Citrix Workspace. Disparate systems can work together. It makes clear what needs to be done, and then we can move to the next level, which is democratization of data. With that, you’re able to put information in front of people in synchronization. They can see complex supply chains complete, they can close sales quicker, et cetera. So, it’s really awesome.
I think we’re still at the tip of the iceberg. The innovation that I’m aware of on the product roadmap with Citrix is just awesome, and that’s why we’re here as a partner.
Gardner: Tim, we’re hearing about the importance of extended enterprise collaboration and democratization of data. Is there anything in your research that shows why that’s important and how you’re using that understanding of what’s important to help shape the direction of Citrix products?
Augmented workers arrive
Minahan: As Ray said, it’s about abstracting away that lower-level complexity, providing all the integrations, the source systems, the service security model, and providing the underlying workflow engines and tools. Then experts like Lucid and A2K can extend that to create new solutions for driving business outcomes.
From the research, we can expect the emergence of the augmented worker, number one. We’re already beginning to see it with bots and robotic process automation (RPA) systems. But at Citrix we’re going to be moving to a much higher level, where it will do things similar to what Ray and Jeff were saying, abstracting away a lot of the menial tasks that can be automated. But we can also perform at a higher level, tasks at a much more informed and rapid pace through use of AI, which can compress and analyze massive amounts of data that would take us a very long time individually. ML can adapt and personalize that experience for us.
Secondly, the research indicates that while robots will replace some tasks and jobs, they will also create many new jobs. And, according to our Work 2035 research, you’ll see a rise in demand for new roles, such as a bot or AI trainer, a virtual reality manager, advanced data scientists, privacy and trust managers, and design thinkers such as the folks at A2K and Lucid Technology Solutions are already doing. They are already working with clients to uncover the art of the possible and rethinking business process transformation.
Importantly, we also identified the need for flexibility of work. Shifting your mindset from thinking about a workforce in terms of full-time equivalents (FTEs) instead of pools of talent. And you understand the individual skillsets that you need and bring them together and assemble them rather quickly to address a certain project or issue that you have using digital Citrix Workspace technology, and then disassemble them just as quickly.
But you’ll also see a change in leadership. AI is going to take over a lot of those business decisions and possibly eliminate the need for some middle management teams. The bulk of our focus can be not so much managing as driving new creative ideas and innovation.
Gardner: I’d love to hear more from both Jeff and Ray about how businesses prepare themselves to best take advantage of the next stages of remote work. What do you tell businesses about thinking differently in order to take advantage of this opportunity?
Imagine what’s possible to work
Vincent: Probably the single biggest thing you can do to get prepared for the future of work is to rethink IT and your human capital, your team members. What do they need as a whole?
A business calls me up and says, “Our server is getting old, we need to get a new server.” And previously, I’d say, “Well, I don’t know if you actually need a server on-site, maybe we talk about the cloud.”
So educate yourself as a business leader on what out there is possible. Then take that step, listen to your IT staff, listen to your IT director, whoever that may be, and talk to them about what is out there and what’s really possible. The technology enabling remote work has grown exponentially, even in last few months, in its adoption and capabilities.
If you looked at the technology a year or two ago, that world doesn’t exist anymore. The technology has grown dramatically. The price point has come down dramatically. What is now possible wasn’t a few years ago.
So listen to your technology advisers, look at what’s possible, and prepare yourself for the next step. Take capital and reinvest it into the future of work.
Wolf: What we’re seeing that’s working the best is people are getting started anyway, anyhow. There really wasn’t a playbook set up for a pandemic, and it’s still evolving. We’re experiencing about 15 years’ worth of change in every three months of what’s going on. And there’s still plenty of uncertainty, but that can’t paralyze you.
We recommend that people fundamentally take a look at what your core business is. What do you do for a living? And then everything that enables you to do that is kind of ancillary or secondary.
When it comes to your workforce -- whether it’s comprised of contractors or freelancers or permanent employees -- no matter where they are, have a get stuff done mentality. It’s about what you are trying to get done. Don’t ask them about the systems yet. Just say, “What are you trying to get done?” And, “What will it take for you to double your speed and essentially only put half the effort into it?”
And listen. And then define, configure, and acquire the technologies that will enable that to happen. We need to think about what’s possible at the ground level, and not so much thinking about it all in terms of the systems and the applications. What are people trying to do every day and how do we make their work experience and their work life better so that they can thrive through this situation as well as the company?
Gardner: Tim, what did you find most surprising or unexpected in the research from the Work 2035 project? And is there a way for our audience to learn more about this Citrix research?
Minahan: One of the most alarming things to me from the Work 2035 project, the one where we’ve gotten the most visceral reaction, was the anticipation that, by 2035, in order to gain an advantage in the workplace, employees would literally be embedding microchips to help them process information and be far more productive in the workforce.
I’m interested to see whether that comes to bear or not, but certainly it’s very clear that the role of AI and ML -- we’re only scratching the surface as we drive to new work models and new levels of productivity. We’re already seeing the beginnings of the augmented worker and just what’s possible when you have bots sitting -- virtually and physically -- alongside employees in the workplace.
We’re seeing the future of work accelerate much quicker than we anticipated. As we emerge out the other side of the pandemic, with the guidance of folks like Lucid and A2K, companies are beginning to rethink their work models and liberate their thinking in ways they hadn’t considered for decades. So it’s an incredibly exciting time.
Gardner: And where can people go to learn more about your research findings at Citrix?
Minahan: To view the Work 2035 project, you can find the foundational research at Citrix.com, but this is an ongoing dialogue that we want to continue to foster with thought leaders like Ray and Jeff, as well as academia and governments, as we all prepare not just technically but culturally for the future of work.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.
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