 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, this is an episode in the remote works Citrix virtual series. Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know, for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so-called work from home offset. And I'll explain that in a little bit, but there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really pleased to have on Donna Kimmel as the executive vice president and chief people officer. Donna, great to see you, thanks for coming on. Thank you. And she's joined by Mira Rajavelle who's the CIO of Citrix. Mira, thank you as well. Thank you. So, I mean, this thing has been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue. Guys, if you would actually bring up that chart, I want to sort of set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1,300 CIOs and IT practitioners that we asked them, how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red, we all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly, about 35% of the respondents said no change. They're actually going to plow ahead, but what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said, we're actually going to spend more. And so you could see from the data that it's actually would be a lot worse were it not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really of work from home infrastructure. And guys, that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna, let me start with you. I mean, we always talk about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water would work from home infrastructure to all in. Your thoughts, I mean, this is just overnight. Absolutely. You know, I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual and probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced even in my career and many others. This was pretty much thrust upon us, the work from home. And we realized that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And in addition to it not necessarily being set up the way that we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so most people thought for the first couple of weeks, well, I can get through this for, it's not an extended period of time, but the reality is it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, when we step back and think we're as humans, we're all survivors and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. Now, the executives that I've been talking to they to a person start with, look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that. Donna, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, how you, what is it, the cadence of your communication, the transparency of your communication. What really was your first move, if you will? Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we? What is our culture? What's important to us? And we recognize at Citrix that it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we need to show, understand as much of the experience as possible that our employees are having and really come at it from, I think, a place of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful because when our employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers, to support our sales partners and certainly ultimately our communities. But we, when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to develop plans and programs and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it and we'll have an opportunity to talk with Mira as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective. We always think about the culture of the organization, which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible? And then the third piece is our digital space. And if you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram and that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so culture is, sorry, did you want to? No, no, please. Yeah, I was just gonna say culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection because the more we can be connected with each other's managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are, people will feel less isolated because without that face to face, it makes it, in face to face, and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees because they were thrust into the situation when they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office, there's almost a professional feel in that work environment. And so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism at their home. And the reality is it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them, right? There's homeschooling going on, there's no childcare or elder care, there's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video camera's on. And I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with, that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming, that really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece, as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Mira comes in is so important. Do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, as Mira and I have talked, that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive the right experience to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. All right, so Mira, let's get into that. So once you've established through the self, the safety, the health of your employees, obviously financial flexibility and runway and the like, their physical digital space, now you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course, Citrix has been in this business for decades, so you know a lot about this. But nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on how you responded and kind of where we're at in that journey. Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the things Donna mentioned, right, the three aspects, when we moved to work from home, the biggest piece of this aspect that made it, like for example, she was telling, I mean, I myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle. I'm right now in the middle of my transition. I'm not settling my new house. And literally I'm doing this interview with the sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space when we are in an office location is not anymore that we can control. So the digital space need to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have been always been talking about remote work and employee experience. We have got that ingrained. So when we have to go into this remote work space, in a workforce culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on but IT has to come in. It's not a easy job because we want to give people the ability to do what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical efficiencies that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's, right? It starts with connectivity, right? Connectivity being are we providing the right kind of connectivity which is through a secure connection? At the end of the day, my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity but also wrap it up with a greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from performance point of view, using technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest how we can break out the circuits to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last mile to understand where the true problem is because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, even if we can provide superior experience, their experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay, how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a way optimized so it doesn't become a productivity hit for the employee. The second is if you think about productivity for employees and it's all about information sharing and content sharing, right? So I call the second C as the content, the ability for the employee to have the right data at the right place so they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like whether it is your share file or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform, it doesn't matter but you have to really make sure the data and information are available and we focused on making sure that we are streamlined and communicating about that very awkwardly like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right? I mean, that's actually where, we are now compensating for the physical touch with the digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your video conferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together, right? I mean, ability to share, ability to whiteboard. I had last week three days offsite and it was a complete virtual offsite with nine hours of working session and we used all kinds of tools. Literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our content sharing platform. So whatever we are doing, these are all connected and the end of the day, I truly felt like, you know what, I can contribute to not adding to the carbon footprint of the globe because truly we had people from all over the globe, all of a sudden I'm getting feedback from employees saying, now the playing field is completely leveled down. People who have been remote users before, they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody is same, in fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employee and say, hey, what is the tips that I can use from you to make sure I'm productive, right? So I see the culture aspect is super important. That's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and in a way that we are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee's shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between HR and IT. Now, of course, HR and IT have always had a relationship, but it really has been around the human capital management software, whether it was simplified and efficient onboarding or certain change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? I think what we're doing together, what Mira and I and the IT and the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization, what is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment and then being able to do it in a way both in a physical environment, whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote, we do look collectively together at the change management. How do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things and utilize that and learn from it? So if we experiment with certain types of productivity tools as Mira was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed a change, what worked for some teams and didn't work for others. When she and I can do that together and our departments can do that together, that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. I would probably add one more thing to what Dana said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, the human resource, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture of the subcultures, right? I mean, I've never been in a company, even when it's a thousand people company, you have subcultures. And HR is involved in the culture of those subcultures as we are going through from IT point of view, we look at it from user personas, okay? So a salesperson who's actually always on road or always like more of a remote worker versus an engineering person, I mean, we are a software company and R&D persona requires a different set of productivity tools compared to a salesperson, compared to an executive, compared to an executive assistant, right? So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business and that type of personas. And HR is absolutely crucial, because as we are looking at it, we are saying, hey, what is the success for this organization and what's a culture of that organization and what are the primary job roles? And we don't do it just with HR, but HR gives us so much content to get jumpstart. Then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with the blank sheet of paper, we are going with something that they can react to and they can add to it. So we are doing a design thinking with them with something they can start to gather rather than white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, if you ask what do you want, you'll be getting pie in the sky and the moon. Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies too. I'll help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been saying is that, you know, we've never seen obviously anything like this before, a forced shutdown of the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 9-11, you know, post 9-11, we are going to see some things here that have permanence. That post GDPR, for example, it required, you know, certain changes. So, Don, I wonder if we can start with you. Just, and it's ironic that, you know, we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert to 2019. There's not just going to be some, you know, all of a sudden everything is rosy again. It's not, there's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that and do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? Yeah, you know, when I step back and I think about this and I think a large part that has to do with much of what Mira was just talking about in terms of design thinking, it's really, I think for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right, what's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that, you know, that business provides? What are the subcultures in the organization? So for me, it really does step back to say, look, we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models where, you know, in the past it would be really easy for managers to say, you know, I don't think my team can work remotely or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work and providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. You know, Mira, this notion that Donna's bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub-optimize near-term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now, at the same time, I know how CEOs think and they say, okay, great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine, we'll maybe sacrifice some short-term performance, and I had a really interesting conversation recently with the chief data officer who said, you don't have to sacrifice necessarily with data in this new era. There actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? I agree with that statement because to me, you know, today's business, we need to look at, I mean, especially with the cloud and some of the new technologies that we have, I mean, even I seriously think coming out of COVID, there's going to be industries that are going to come out, new business models that are going to emerge, right? I mean, think about telemedicine. We have been very, very hesitant about telemedicine for decades now. I mean, that's not a new concept, but we have been very hesitant. We said, I have to see the doctor, but today, pretty much everybody, except for if you're seriously injured, you're getting telemedicine. That industry is going to evolve, right? So to me, the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely, and for me, it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it, the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful, that's why even HR, you know, partnership is even more greater. The businesses that has talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right? I mean, regardless, you know, whether you're in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R&D, you're in manufacturing, doesn't matter, your digital dexterity of your company really makes you, whether you win in the market or you're one of those dinosaurs in the market, right? And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change. That's actually educating, right? I mean, we don't want to leave. We already have talent shortage and we don't want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others because, I mean, recently, I've been going through the scaled agile framework, which is a lean agile. And I really love that word of lean agile. Lean has a lot of economies of scale. Agile brings a lot of agility. When you bring them together, you get both. And that's exactly what we need to do with our talent. Bring the wisdom and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring with that. How do we get it from a productivity? Of course, we want to be respectful of privacy, but as we have been going through, we have been looking at different productivity metrics, looking at, you know, what is the usage pattern of our employees, how much code checkin' they've done? How is my MTTR being? I mean, in my organization, I've been looking at the velocity of our transaction processing and our issue resolution SLA times. And we also even, you know, had a little, because I think at the end of the day, we as human, we actually are social animals. We need the touch and we cannot forget. We are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce how they're feeling about it and also looking at the data to see is the productivity is telling the story what people are talking about. And to our surprise, you know, 66% of our population, when we did this pulse survey, said they feel more productive in this situation because many of them contributed that to, you know, the time they save from not commuting or they feel just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family is actually giving them that extra boost and they can really do a work life integration, not like a work life balance they need to do. And we also heard about 11% fell pretty much there in the same range. And, but I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, right? I mean, we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to touch the physical things and those jobs in certain days need to be, you know, more physical. So there's about three to 5% depending on your job function said, you know what, I need access to the lab because I really deal with changing my connectivity, changing my, or it is like for the customer, I'm repairing their board. I really need to see that. Those are the ones where we find kind of, you know, absolute physical touches required. You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business, you talk about the digital transformation. I've been saying this is going to accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at the cube, we've been up remote studios, no problem. You're a software company, you've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model so you can code remotely, but there are some industries and in particular industries where you guys sell a lot of products. I think about healthcare. You mentioned telemedicine, Mira, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, very highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know, your main thrust, you talk to your peers in those industries. So, and I've always said, you know, some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed. They're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate, you know, some of those industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both, you know, comment from both the technology perspective and a people perspective. You know, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and these new ways of thinking about getting work done is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me, it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue, sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand, again, what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? I think for me, it comes down to, you know, protection is always an extinction, right? I mean, if you're trying to protect a current model and if you're trying to be saying, you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you, to some extent, influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me, looking at it to see, especially with today's technology around, you know, manufacturing industry is probably going to see a lot of remote hands as well with IoT and robotics coming in. And I see there is going to be one area you may see a drip down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up. And especially, which is already shortage. I mean, if I remember the last survey from KPMG in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIOs responded. They are having challenges with the, you know, filling the roles. And I also remember the other one is around the Confery Survey of Tech Technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we are going to leave somewhere around 8.7 billion or $7 trillion of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean, this is a time for, you know, really, how do you ensure there are industries that are going to transform, which means there are certain skills, people need to reskill. I mean, even in technology, the reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually, nobody is, you know, spot from that one in my opinion in today's world. So that reskill and upskill is going to, the ones who are going to embrace that, they're going to be in a bigger way, taking advantage of these transitions and transformations. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the hype may have a broader adoption. So you mentioned about the Chief Data Officer talking about how data can come in. I mean, I see automation accelerating and data is going to be a core component of acceleration and you will see more and more, you know, things around how measurements becomes important as a start that leads to, you know, more data modeling that leads to more automation. That cycle is going to accelerate the influence of AI is going to accelerate even further than where we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know, we have been slow in adoption if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problem. I mean, when I did a reflection with my team, the one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated automation more. Well, I think those are some really, really interesting and deep points. Really no industry is safe from disruption and really mirror to your points. If you're just paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future, you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this and it's our pleasure to be able to post and interview such experts like yourselves. I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Mira, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much for having us. You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, for my CXO series. We will see you next time.