>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is and 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 is the Executive Vice President and Chief chief people officer. Donna, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And she she's joined by Meerah Rajavel, who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, 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 that chart. I want to set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 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 can see from the data, that it's actually would be a lot worse, we're not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really have worked 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, this is we're always talking about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water with 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. You know 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. You know, 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, you know 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, you know, 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, you know what is it the cadence of your communication? The transparency of your communication? What really was your kind of 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 what is our culture, what's important to us and we recognize it Citrix, it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we to show understand as much of the experience as possible that are that our employees are having, and really come at it from, I think a place of, 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 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 you know we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah 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 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. 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-- >> Oh no please. >> Yeah. 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, and 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 in 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 eldercare. There's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video cameras 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 Meerah comes in is so, so important, do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive variance to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah, let's let's get into that. So once you've established the safety, the health of your 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 on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one other thing 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 settled 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 any more 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 workspace, work force 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 an easy job because we want to give people the ability to do they what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical, you know 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 to 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 you know technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest, how we can, you know 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, you know 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 tip 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 is 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 ShareFile or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform JIRA, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure that data and information are available. And we focused on making sure that we are streamlined that and communicating about that very vocally 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 a 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, the ability to share, a ability to whiteboard I had last week, three days off site, and it was a complete virtual off site with nine hours of working session. And we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So whatever we are doing, these are all connected. At the end of the day I truly felt like you know what i can contribute to not you know adding to the carbon footprint of the globe, because we have people from all over the globe, all of a sudden, I'm getting feedback from employees saying now the playing field is completely level down, people who have been remote users before they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same. In fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employees 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, you know 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 shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. >> So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between between HR and IT now, of course, HR IT have always had a relationship but it really has been around that Human Capital Managers 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? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together what Meerah and I and the IT in 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 we experiment with certain types of productivity tools, as Meerah was, was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed to 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. >> Yeah, I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, you know 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 1000 people company, you have subcultures. And HR is in 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're saying, hey, what is the success for this organization, and what's the culture of that organization and one of the primary job roles and we don't do just with HR but HR gives us so much you know content to get jumpstart, then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with a 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 begin start together rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, he's asked, what do you want, you'll be getting, you know finding the sky on the moon. >> Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies to help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been been saying is that, you know we've never seen obviously anything like this before a forced shutdown to the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911 we are going to see some things here that that have permanence, bad post GDPR for example, it required, certain changes. So, Donna, I want to begin start with you. Just 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 the 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 stepped back and I think about this, and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah 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 it, 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, Meerah, this notion that Don is 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 thing and they say, okay great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine. We'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance, but I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer said you don't have to sacrifice necessarily, with 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 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 see this thing 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 work, 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 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 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 the 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 vision and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring there. How 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 checking they've done? How was 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 human we actually We are social animals, we need that patch. 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 if 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 commented that, you know the time they save from not commuting, or the 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% felt pretty much they're 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 patch the physical things. And those jobs in certain days need to be, more physical. So there's about 3-5%, 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 a dislike 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 touch is required. >> You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business 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 in particular industries, where you guys sell a lot of product, I think about healthcare, you mentioned telemedicine, Meerah, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, they're highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers and 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-- >> Absolutely. Industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know, I think, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset. And it and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and needs 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 that 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 Korn Ferry survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we're going to leave 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 that reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually it's nobody is there, you know spark from that one, in my opinion in today's world. so that reskill and upskill is going to be the ones who are going to embrace that they're going to be in a bigger way and 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'd 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 when we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know we have been slow in that option if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problems. I mean, then I did a reflection with my team. The one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated accelerated automation more. >> Well, I think what are some really, really interesting and deep points, but really no industry is safe, from disruption and in really Meerah 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 an interview such experts like yourselves, really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Meerah, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. For my CXO series we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, this is a Citrix Virtual Series examining the realities of a remote work world. >> 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 is the Executive Vice President and Chief chief people officer. Donna, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And she she's joined by Meerah Rajavel, who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, 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 that chart. I want to set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 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 can see from the data, that it's actually would be a lot worse, we're not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really have worked 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, this is we're always talking about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water with 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. You know 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. You know, 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, you know 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, you know, 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, you know what is it the cadence of your communication? The transparency of your communication? What really was your kind of 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 what is our culture, what's important to us and we recognize it Citrix, it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we to show understand as much of the experience as possible that are that our employees are having, and really come at it from, I think a place of, 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 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 you know we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah 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 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. 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-- >> Oh no please. >> Yeah. 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, and 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 in 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 eldercare. There's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video cameras 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 Meerah comes in is so, so important, do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive variance to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah, let's let's get into that. So once you've established the safety, the health of your 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 on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one other thing 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 settled 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 any more 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 workspace, work force 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 an easy job because we want to give people the ability to do they what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical, you know 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 to 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 you know technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest, how we can, you know 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, you know 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 tip 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 is 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 ShareFile or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform JIRA, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure that data and information are available. And we focused on making sure that we are streamlined that and communicating about that very vocally 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 a 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, the ability to share, a ability to whiteboard I had last week, three days off site, and it was a complete virtual off site with nine hours of working session. And we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our conference 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 you know adding to the carbon footprint of the globe, because we have people from all over the globe, all of a sudden, I'm getting feedback from employees saying now the playing field is completely level down, people who have been remote users before they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same. In fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employees 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, you know 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 shoes is a super important thing from a technology point. >> So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between between HR and IT now, of course, HR IT have always had a relationship but it really has been around that Human Capital Managers 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? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together what Meerah and I and the IT in 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 we experiment with certain types of productivity tools, as Meerah was, was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed to 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. >> Yeah, I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, you know 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 1000 people company, you have subcultures. And HR is in 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're saying, hey, what is the success for this organization, and what's the culture of that organization and one of the primary job roles and we don't do just with HR but HR gives us so much you know content to get jumpstart, then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with a 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 begin start together rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, he's asked, what do you want, you'll be getting, you know finding the sky on the moon. >> Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies to help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been been saying is that, you know we've never seen obviously anything like this before a forced shutdown to the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911 we are going to see some things here that that have permanence, bad post GDPR for example, it required, certain changes. So, Donna, I want to begin start with you. Just 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 the 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 stepped back and I think about this, and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah 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 it, 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, Meerah, this notion that Don is 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 thing and they say, okay great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine. We'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance, but I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer said you don't have to sacrifice necessarily, with 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 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 see this thing 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 work, 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 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 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 the 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 vision and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring there. How 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 checking they've done? How was 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 human we actually We are social animals, we need that patch. 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 if 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 commented that, you know the time they save from not commuting, or the 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% felt pretty much they're 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 patch the physical things. And those jobs in certain days need to be, more physical. So there's about 3-5%, 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 a dislike 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 touch is required. >> You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business 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 in particular industries, where you guys sell a lot of product, I think about healthcare, you mentioned telemedicine, Meerah, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, they're highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers and 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-- >> Absolutely. Industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know, I think, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset. And it and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and needs 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 that 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 Korn Ferry survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we're going to leave 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 that reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually it's nobody is there, you know spark from that one, in my opinion in today's world. so that reskill and upskill is going to be the ones who are going to embrace that they're going to be in a bigger way and 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'd 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 when we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know we have been slow in that option if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problems. I mean, then I did a reflection with my team. The one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated accelerated automation more. >> Well, I think what are some really, really interesting and deep points, but really no industry is safe, from disruption and in really Meerah 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 an interview such experts like yourselves, really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Meerah, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. For my CXO series we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante 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 please to have on. Donna Kimmel, the Executive Vice-President and Chief People Officer. Donna, great to see ya', thanks for comin' on. >> Thank you. >> And she's joined by Meerah Rajavel who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So I mean this thing, it's 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 1300 CIO's 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 can 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, process and technology. I mean we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure to all in. (chuckles) 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 realize 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 neccesarily being setup the way 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 you know for it's not an extended period of time, but the reality it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know 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, you know what is it the cadence of your communication, the transparency of your communication, what really was your, sort of 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 are 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 community. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to developing plans and programs and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it, we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah 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. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, 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, I'm, >> Oh no, please, keep on talking, go ahead. >> Yeah, I was just going to 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 as 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, and 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 home schooling going on, there's no child care 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 Meerah comes in and is so, so important. Do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFF. 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 Meerah let's get into that. So once you've established though 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 you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the things Donna mentioned right, the three aspects. When we move to work from home the biggest piece of this aspect that made it, like for example she was telling, like 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 settled in 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 you are in an office location it's not anymore that we can control. So the digital space needs 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 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 work force 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 an easy job, because we want to give people the ability to do what they want in a productive fashion, but now digital needs to compensate for the physical, you know efficiency that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's. 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 wrap it up with the greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from a performance point of view, using technologies like Sdram and maximizing their performance to their nearest, how we can break out the security to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last way understand where the true problem, because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide experience, they're 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 very optimized so it doesn't become a productivity hit for the employee. The second is you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing right. So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data, the right place and 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 vision platform, G-Drive, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure the data and information are available and be focused on making sure that they are streamlined and communicating about that very openly, like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right. I mean that's actually with, you know we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your videoconferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together right. I mean the ability to share, the ability to white board. I had last week, three days offsite and it was a complete virtual offsite with nine hours of working sessions and we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital sticky's to move around that integrated into our videoconferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So that whatever they are doing, those are all connected. At 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 us set in. I'm getting feedback from employees saying, now the playing field is completely leveled down. People who were being remote users before, they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same, in fact my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employee and say, "Hey what is some 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 you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and innovative. We are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee 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, like you know Human Capital Management software, whether it was simplified and efficient, onboarding, or certain you know change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together, what Meerah 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 Meerah was talking about. Which ones work, which ones needed a change, what works 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 Donna said. I mean the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resources, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture, of the sub-cultures, right. I mean I've never been in a company even when it's a thousand people company, you have sub-cultures. And HR you know involved in the culture of those sub-cultures. As we are going through from IT point of view, we look at it from user persona, okay. So a salesperson who's actually always on the road or always like more remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean we are a software company, an R & D persona quite a different set of productivity tools compared to a sales person, compared to an executive, compared to an executive assistant right. So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business and the type of persona. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it they're saying, what is a success for this organization? And what the culture of the organization and what are the primary job roles? And we don't do it just with HR, but HR uses so much content to get jump start and then we engage with the real users. We are not going with a blank sheet of paper. We are going with something that they can react to and they add to it. So we're doing a design thinking with them that something they can be in start to get rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, you know ask what you want, you'll be getting pie in the sky and the moon. >> Well it's a good thing you have those virtual sticky's too. That'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 shut down of the economy which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911, we are going to see some things here that have permanence. And post GDPR for example, it required certain changes. So Donna, I wonder if we could start with you, just and it's ironic that 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. It's going to, 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 of it has to do with much of what Meerah 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 that business provides? What are the sub-cultures 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 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, Meerah 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 CEO's think. And they say okay great, we're going to make that investment yeah, fine we'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance. But and I had a really interesting conversation recently with a 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 technology 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 your seriously injured you're getting Telemedicine. That industry is going to work right. So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely 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 have talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right. I mean regardless you know, where you are 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 Scaled Agile Framework, which is a Lean-Agile. And I really love the board of Lean-Agile. Lean has a lot of economy's of scale. Agile brings a lot of volatility. When you bring them together you get both and that's exactly what we need to do with our talent. Bring the system and bring the digital dexterity that we need to bring to that. Can 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 for employees? How much quotient they have done, how was my MTTR? I mean in my organization I've been looking at the velocity of all transaction processing, Azure, Allusion escalate time. And we also even you know kind of little, because I think at the end of the day we as humans, we actually are social animals. We need the touch and we can not 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 are feeling about it and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story what people are talking about. And quite surprised, 66% of our population when we did this culture survey, said they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them contribute it back to, 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 getting them an 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% felt pretty much, they are in the same range. But I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, but I mean we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to touch the physical things. And those jobs in certain ways need to be, you know more physical. So there's about three to five percent depending on your job functions that, you know what I need access to the lab, because I really feel the changing my connectivity, changing my or just like for the customer I'm repairing their board. I really need to see that. Those are the ones where we find you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know in a way I mean we're kind of lucky in the technology business, talk about the digital transformation and I've been saying this has been accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at theCUBE, we've been a 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 product. I think about healthcare, you mentioned Telemedicine Meerah. Financial services, the Feds, big users of VDI, highly regulated and secure industries. 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 a 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 in extinction, right, I mean if you're trying to protect a current model and 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's probably going to see a lot of remote trends that while with IOT and robotics coming in. And I see there's going to be one area you may see a drift 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 CIO's responded they are having challenges with you know filling the roles. And I also remember the other one is around country survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030 the expectation is we are going to leave something around 8.7 billion or seven trillion dollars of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean this is the time for you know, really how do you insure, there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills people need re-skill. I mean, even in technology, the re-skill and the up-skill is good to be a constant thing that's actually it's, nobody is bit you know as far from that one in my opinion in today's world. So that re-skill and up-skill is going to, the one's who are going to embrace that, they're going to be in a bigger way, taking advantage of this transitions and transformation. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the height may have a broader adoption. So you had mentioned about the chief data office, talking about how data can come in. I mean I see automation accelerating. And data is going to be a full component of acceleration and you will see more and more, you know things around how measurement becomes important as a start, that leads to you know more data modeling, that least to more automation. That cycle is going to accelerate. The influence of AI is going to actually even further than we have said. I just wish some of the areas with you know, we have been slow in adoption, a few 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 was some really, really interesting and deep points. Really no industry is safe from disruption and really Meerah to your points, if you're just a 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 host and interview such experts like yourselves. I really appreciate you're sharing your insights and your experience with our audience. I mean we're kind of all in this together. So thank you Donna, Meerah. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you so much for having us. >> You're welcome and thank your for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE for my CXO series. We will see you next time. (calm music)

>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019 brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, coming to you live from day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy in Atlanta, Georgia. We're very pleased to welcome Citrix's Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, EVP-- >> Yeah. >> And Chief People Officer. Thank you so much for joining Keith and me this afternoon. >> My pleasure. It's great to be here, Lisa and Keith. Thank you. >> I was telling you before we went live, Donna, this has been a great event. This is our first day of coverage, but the keynote really kicked things off very, in a way that's so relatable, just showing workforce, and some of the stats you guys gave were staggering. The fact that power users are who enterprise software is designed for. But that's 1% of the users. >> Donna: Exactly. >> Or things like $7 trillion is wasted a year, and Keith's brought this up on a number of our interviews, of wasted productivity. There's a huge need for employee experience to become a C-level business imperative. >> Donna: Yeah. >> Talk to us about that from Citrix's point of view. >> Absolutely. Employee experience is incredibly important. When I think about the concept, it is really about people and technology together. And we can't do great things in the workplace if we don't have the right tools at our fingertips, and technology really supports that. But employee experience is also very broad. It's all encompassing. When we think about employee experience, it's everything from when somebody starts or applies to a company, what kind of experience are they having with that company? What is their interview process like? What is their pre-hire process like? What happens when they come for their onboarding? Are they experiencing the company the way that they should, and then it's about their career journey. So employee experience is incredibly important, and it's incredibly pervasive. But I think it also starts with understanding why it matters to companies. And I think when you look at why it matters to companies, companies can't be successful without people. It's people that are the one's that are driving results. It's people that are the ones that are collaborating and bringing the culture of that company to life, and it's people that are driving new product design and thinking about what customers need and putting customers first. And companies are successful because of the people within it, so we need to create experiences that make a difference. >> So as we talk about those experiences, when I think of Citrix, I think of Citrix in a traditional sense. You front end a work day. You front end HRM from SAP, those solutions. So as Citrix starts to engage more with HR directly, talk me about that value conversation Citrix is having with HR and how Citrix adds value versus a company that's specific focus is in creating HR software. >> Exactly. So we're creating software that enables employees and people in an organization, talent in an organization, to be successful to do their best work on a daily basis. So though we are not creating HR software per se, what we are creating is employee experience, and it's employee experience through the technology. So when employees have the right tools at their fingertips in a way that cuts out the continual searching, as one of the things that we talked about this morning in the keynote, was all about how much time is wasted. At least 25% of an employee's time is wasted searching or context switching between applications, not being able to use the applications to their fullest. And we recognize there's a fair amount that employees need to do that are very task-oriented. And if you can automate those and bring them to the employee in a very intelligent way, using the analytics. You also heard about that this morning as well. The analytics get to know the employee. So it's more personal. So you get what you need to at your fingertips, you can do it more quickly, more easily, and then really focus on some of the more critical things that are going to help you be successful as an employee. >> You bring up the personal aspect, and I think personalization is becoming more and more a critical element of... because as consumers we expect that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So we're starting to see the influences of the consumerization of IT, and it really is something that can be a big differentiator to attract talent and retain talent-- >> Yeah. >> Which is also a business imperative. I'm glad, though, that you brought up, hey, employee experience isn't just, okay, this intelligent experience, and I can have access to all my apps. It starts with the hiring process. >> Absolutely. >> The interviewing, the recruiting. We were talking about our different onboarding experiences, Keith and I were at lunch and how that really can set the tone-- >> Donna: Exactly. >> Of an employee with their employer, and you're right. It's not just about the technology needs to be an enabler, but it's got to start from even the recruitment. >> Exactly. >> When I step back, and I think about employee experience, it brings me back to the concepts that we've been talking about for a while now regarding the future of work. It's really about a company having the right culture, creating the right physical space and digital space, and then also, the technology that's used. And again, culture can be a real differentiator for an organization, just like we know that the talent is a differentiator for companies. But when you think about the culture, it really speaks to what's important to human beings, what's important to employees? Are they socially involved? Is their product meaningful? Is what their doing meaningful to the community, to the customers that they're serving? So are we tapping into what's meaningful to people? Are employees being given opportunities for flexibility and collaboration? Are they being given opportunities for choice? And that also brings me back to what you were talking about in terms of personalization. If we think about the workforce, right now, at least at Citrix, we have about five different generations in our workforce. And you might be able to look across all those different generations and look for trends and different ways that generations might work, but the reality is it's about the individual. It's truly about understanding that individual's choice for working anywhere, anyhow, anyway, on any device. That's what's really going to drive a difference. That becomes part of the culture. If you have the right, again, grounded values, you have the right environment that you're creating, that is part of the appeal to employees. And then you try to create the right space, and you want to create the right physical space because when employees are in the workforce, and when they come into the office, you want it to feel like a place where they can collaborate, where they can change and move, and move into private space if they need it, or quiet space if they need it, or opportunities for, as we say, collisions at the coffee machine where all of a sudden new ideas come out because you're generating thoughts and conversation. So space, physical space, and all of that movement also mimics our personal worlds, right? We get up and we move around to different kind of spaces throughout the day. We want our workspace to feel the same way. And then the other piece to that is technology. And are we creating the right technological tools that enable employees to have that freedom and that choice around the kinds of devices they're using and the spaces where they're working in to really be able to bring their best selves to the workplace and contribute because ultimately, we want to be part of successful organizations. So it's a combination of all of those for me in terms of the question that you were just asking. >> So you're a EVP of a nice size software company. And some of these things you've had to put into practice. Citrix is a 30-year-old company. I think I'm aging myself because I've done a few Citrix deployments early in my own career. >> Yeah. >> As you start to pivot, you're part of these executive-level conversations saying, "We're going to invest in AI, machine learning," and you look at this job market for AI, ML data scientists, it's a tight market. It's really hard to attract the talent. While Florida is lovely, it may not be the place for ML or AI talent, but more specifically, this type of talent might be spread across the world. >> Donna: That's right. >> What types of changes have you had to oversee inside of Citrix to attract and retain that talent? >> Absolutely. I think it's a great point because I think not only are we at Citrix doing it, but many other companies are looking at the same kind of question, which is where do we find the best talent, and how do we enable that talent anywhere around the world to successfully contribute to our company? And because it is so challenging to find talent, we do need to be more flexible as organizations. We need to look at distributed office locations. We need to look at opportunities for people to be able to work from their homes. We look at a total labor force, like gig workers, in addition to contractors and employee base. So our technology enables that. And I think that's one of the great selling points of having people join Citrix is you are part of the movement of helping organizations be flexible. You're part of helping to drive that kind of employee experience so you can hire anyone from anywhere around the world in order to help you achieve the business results that you're looking for. >> In the four years that you've been EVP and Chief People Officer, how have you helped this culture to evolve? As Keith mentioned, this is a 30-year-young company, and cultural change is challenging, again, but we think about it in our personal lives, change is hard. >> Donna: Yeah. >> What are some of the key strategies that you've employed to help facilitate that cultural change? >> It's a great question. When I joined about three and a half years ago, we were embarking on a transformation at the company and part of that transformation was taking a look at where we needed to evolve from a product strategy perspective and from meeting our customer needs in a very different way. And the more we got out there and listened to our customers, it helped solidify what we needed to do from a strategy perspective. What we also realized is you'll never be able to accomplish your strategy without the right people. And you need the right culture and the right set of values that are going to underpin everything you do as a company. So we took some very strong values that were already part of Citrix and kind of modernized them, brought them into words that had meaning for our employees. So we did quite a few feedback sessions, surveys, and things, and gathered. And we really focus, from a strong values perspective, on integrity, respect, curiosity, courage, and unity. And those words have incredible meaning for us in terms of what we're doing to not only transform the products and the markets that we're in, but how do we transform our own workplace to continue to drive an employee experience that lives out those values and that culture? So it underpins everything that we do. >> So let's talk about lessons that can be applied from Citrix, a big company, to smaller companies, because Citrix has customers across the spectrum from the small shop with less than 10 people, to companies with tens of thousands of people. Is employee experience something that only large companies should consider, or is this something that as entrepreneurs like myself only have a couple of employees, should I be thinking about employee experience in a specific way? >> Yeah, that's a great question. When I think about, again, why employee experience is so important, I think, first, it's because it's about people and it's about humanity, and why it matters to any business regardless of your size, is that it's about people first, and people first are going to help any business be able to achieve its goals and its results. The technology that we're creating also is what we call general purpose. It is for individuals to enable individuals to be successful in their workplace. So I do believe strongly it is for any size organization. And the principles ring true, whether you're a small business or whether you're a large business. I know my sister also has a small business, and the team members that work with her, very small business, the team members that work with her need to feel that same vibrancy of what she's trying to create for her clients. And so I think it's the same for any size business. Culture, values, grounding, experience that you can create to enable those employees to feel like they're part of what you're doing and they're part of your success. >> We talked with Simon Bray earlier, and I learned a new acronym, TOMO. >> Yeah. >> I love that. >> Yeah, it's great. >> Total Motivation. >> Exactly. >> How do you measure cultural transformation within Citrix? What are some of those key, is there an internal NPS survey, or other things that you guys do to go, we're going in the right direction here? >> We do, absolutely. It's no doubt challenging to measure. We do an employee net promoter score, and we do an engagement score. So the net promoter score that we do on a quarterly basis, and our full engagement survey, we do on an annual basis. And since we started our transformation, three and a half years ago, our net promoter score has gone up dramatically. And we are nearing the 50% mark, which is very high for employee net promoter scores. So we feel really proud about the constant movement in the right direction around that score, and the same thing with our engagement scores. And we've become certified two years in a row through Great Places To Work. So again, that movement in the right direction is telling us that our employees do feel connected to who we are, what we're doing, and that they feel part of driving those solutions and those results. >> So I was looking at some of the Citrix revenue numbers over the weekend. Looks like a lot of things are up. Subscription revenues, SAS revenue, workspace revenue, and employee satisfaction is up as well. >> Absolutely, and we're proud of all of it. We talk in a very positive way. David, our CEO, always talks about up and to the right. And we are, all of our measures have been up and to the right on a consistent basis, from an employee perspective and from a business results perspective. And it takes every single employee to be able to do that. >> What are you most excited about as we wrap up here. I know we're so early in Synergy 2019, but like I was saying, we've had such an exciting start to our time here. What are you excited about when this is all done in terms of feedback that you're hoping and expecting to hear from the employees? >> I think probably one of the most exciting things for me is to be in the field that I'm in, Human Resources, focusing on people, and focusing on talent, and recognizing that the product that we are putting out there is making a difference from an employee experience perspective. So being part of that vision, that mission I think is incredibly exciting. So we can live it internally as well as help our customers live it within their own environment. And that connection, I think, is incredibly powerful and really meaningful to be a part of. >> It can be such a differentiator as well if your customers see, ah, there's a Citrix on Citrix story. >> Donna: Absolutely. >> And you're transforming using your own technology, that's one of the best brand validations that you can get, right? >> Absolutely, it helps us tell the story with our customers, and it's a great selling point for new employees that are attracted to coming to work for us, become part of the movement and the change of really driving employee experience and driving that partnership through technology. >> Donna, it's been so great to have you on theCUBE with Keith and me-- >> Thank you. >> Helping to expand, at least my perspective of employee experience. >> Lisa: Thank you so much. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Lisa: Oh, likewise. For Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from our day one coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston. This is an episode in the remote works, Citrix virtual series. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio here on this ongoing leadership series that we've been doing, reaching out to people in the community to get their take on what's going on with the COVID situation, what are best practices, what can we learn and specifically today, really the whole new way to work, and working from home. And we're really excited to have two guests on for this segment. The first one is Amy Hayworth. She is the Chief of Staff for HR for Citrix, joining us from Florida. Amy, great to see. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> And also Tamara McCleary, who's been on many, many times coming to us from Denver. She is a well respected speaker, you've probably seen her doing more speaking than anything else, and also the CEO of Thulium. Tamara, great to see you. >> Thank you, I'm so excited for this conversation. >> Well, let's just jump into it. So it's so funny and doing a little homework, Amy, I came across a Professional Change Management executive conference, 2015 and you were talking about building change management as a profession and working from home was part of that and that was like five years ago and things creep along and then we have a light switch moment where there's no time to plan, there's no time to think, there's no time to implement things, it's, everyone must now stay at home. And so, outside the human tragedy, that is the COVID situation, we're not going to really speak to that here. But from a business point of view, suddenly with no warning, everyone had to work from home. From someone who's been in the profession of trying to drive change management through a process over time, what does that do for you? How do you digest that suddenly oh my goodness, we've got this light switch moment which is a forcing function that may have never come, but now we have to go? I wonder what your take is. >> I think the thing that get me most excited about this light switch moment is it is showing all of us that we are capable beyond what we ever thought we were when it comes to change. We've been called to take a leap, and for much of my experience in the organizational change management field, we spend a lot of time talking about managing resistance and the pushback about change and there's even this thing that drives me crazy, which is change is hard. I don't know why we tell ourselves that message. And I think what this is showing us is that number one, change is inevitable, it's going to happen. There is very little control that we actually have, but also we are more resilient, more adaptable. We're capable of change than many of us knew that we were. And it is calling up for me, what do we need to put in place within organizations to cultivate resilience? Because one of the things I think this is making all of us very aware is how volatile the world actually is. And it's also laid bare where we are strong individually and able to cope and where we also may need to do a little bit of practice and some very intentional resilience building. Though I think the conversation around the whole change management field is about to change and my hope is that focus turns more to resilience than it is to managing change. >> It's interesting 'cause a lot of just the chatter that's out there, is about Zoom. Do I use Zoom? Do I not use Zoom? Is it secure? All this other, people like to jump into the technology piece. But really, we had your boss on the other day, Donna Kimmel, the EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix and she broke it down into three buckets. Culture was number one, physical space is number two and digital space was number three. And I thought it was really interesting that she really leads with empathy and human factors and I think that it's easy to forget those, but bringing up simple things that not only are you working from home, but guess what, your kids are home too and your spouse is home too. And they have meetings and they have Zoom calls, they have to do it or the other dog is still running around and all the other kinds of distractions. So the human factors are so, so important. Tamara, one of your early keynotes about your early development was in your early career working with people who are at the end of their life. And I know it helped you develop an empathy and really a prioritization that I think a lot of people are probably getting today that maybe they haven't thought about, what is truly important, what is truly meaningful. And this again, is this forcing function to say let's pump the brakes a little bit, take a step back and think about what's really important and the human factors. Again, your take on this crazy situation. >> I think you're absolutely right Jeff, and the fact that really what this has done, to Amy's point, yes we are very capable of change, but we're mostly so resistant and unwilling to change. And it's not because we don't want to, it's because we fear what will happen if we do change. And sometimes it's like the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And right now what has been forced upon us is to really think about critical issues. So when you're faced with a lack of toilet paper and uncertainty about your survival rate, you start to think about things in terms of say Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You're looking at that base level, that safety piece. And when people go to safety, they have really left that area of self actualization in what do I want to be, what do I want to do? And it's more about, oh no, what have I done? Do I like my life? I'm stuck here at home, wherever you're sheltering in place and am I really enjoying my life? Am I experiencing my life? And what we really have experienced through being forced to get on to video conferencing, how many of you out there are doing video conferencing like a billion times a day? We're being forced to really see each other as human beings. And that means whether you're the CEO or you're the EVP of global blah, blah, it doesn't matter. What matters is your dog is still barking, your child is still running around and needs something from you in that moment when you happen to be on a call. Because as we all know, with kids, when you say, I can't be bothered for the next 30 minutes, what do you think is going to happen? That's exactly the time when they need more grapes. So I think that what it does is it levels the playing field and it shows us all how human we are. It shows us our strengths as Amy pointed out, and it also shows us our communal frailty. >> So let's get into some of the specifics about what people are feeling. Citrix just commissioned this report put on by one pole, pretty timely, comes out in April, 2020, about working from home. And I think there was really some interesting stuff, still connectivity and bandwidth, still the biggest challenge that people have. Can I even get online, was the number one problem. And when they do, their wifi is slow and there's single sign on. All these things that we've been talking about for years and years and years. I mean, why, why Amy, have we still not gotten it done? It's fascinating to me that in 2020, we still have internet connectivity issues and people don't know how to turn on their microphone on their Zoom call, we're so far behind. >> Yeah, Jeff, I think what we're seeing is number one, it takes practice, then the need to be familiar with all these tools. I also have talked to many parents who first day of homeschool, my son tells me I can't call it homeschool 'cause it's different, it's virtual school, he says it's very different. But that first day, especially families with multiple children trying to get onto a Zoom call with their class, Heron is trying to work, possibly two parents in the house are connected. Our home WiFi networks just haven't taken this kind of load before, but very quickly I think we needed to realize as an organization that this is not work from home, this is working at home during the global pandemic and it is very different. So you mentioned that need to lead with empathy and to really understand what's going on, and I think that's so true and just that the humanness of what we've experienced, that one full research really talked about a few epic moments of mishap, whether it's taking a call from the garage, I have a colleague who would take from the car on the street, still sheltering in place, but the only quiet place to go to take a call. We have a legend in our Singapore office. There's a salesperson who made record numbers working from his garage for a month. So there are all sorts of heroics taking place to balance than in the midst of that when technology isn't acting as we would hope it would under normal circumstances, having to adjust quickly, whether that means staggering schedules, working through accommodations, teachers, however it needs to happen but I think the reality and the acceptance, going back to that humanness and empathy is that we all have to shift our mindset about what work means and even are at work. We've built up a lot of these polishished buttoned up personas and when we are able to actually let some of that down, I think what we're starting to see is connection on a much deeper level amongst teams and among colleagues. >> I'm just looking at the survey at how few people think that this is going to roll over into a little bit more of a permanent form. Only 37% think my organization in general will be more relaxed about remote working. I think staff will be allowed to work from home more regularly, 36%. We had Marten Mickos on and he ran MySQL before it got bought by Sun many moons ago. He talked that he had a distributed team from day one and he laughed. He said, "It's so much easier to fake it at the office, "to look busy versus when you're remote." As you just said Amy, you're only judged by your deliverables. And I thought it was so funny in your blog posts from earlier this year that when managers start managing by outcome and deliverable rather than assuming as good work's getting done because someone showed up at the office, I mean this is ridiculous that people are still judging things based on activity, not outcome. And we're even seeing now all these new tools that people are introducing in the marketplace. I can tell you how often your people are on Zoom and how many hours on the VPN. What are we measuring? We should be measuring outcomes and the piece that comes up over and over is trust. And if I can't trust you to deliver outcomes, I probably have a bigger problem than managing your day to day. Tamara, you see this all the time in terms of the trust and how important this is to relationships. >> I do and in fact our workforce at Thulium has always been a remote workforce. And for the way that I've built our organization is treat everybody like an adult and get your work done. And we do base everything upon productivity versus FaceTime. And I think that the reason some of these larger organizations have had this concept of show up having that FaceTime means that whoever gets there the earliest and leaves the latest somehow has been a better employee, it's not true. It is about productivity. And I think those wise organizations that look at how much they can save with the costs of like AC heat, the building cost, having a brick and mortar for everyone to come into it is very costly. And it's an old paradigm that a lot of middle managers have, which is this control piece. And that if the people are there in the office, they've got more control. And actually what we find is you don't need that control, especially when you look at the younger generational cohort coming up, how they have a totally different view of work. And we've talked a lot about the future of work and the gig economy, and what this COVID pandemic has done for us is to show us that actually work does get done at home. And in fact in some respects, more work gets done at home because it's harder to stop working when your work is happening right there at home. And so it does blur the lines and the boundaries between the work life than the home life. And so I think you get a lot more out of your employees when they work from home. >> It's funny, when Donna was on, she brought up a really interesting topic. She said, "Every time somebody pushes back on that, "can't be done from home." This job, this person, this type of task can't be done from home. The question should always be like, why? It almost sounds like when you move the whole cloud conversation that we've been tracking, went from, when should I move stuff to cloud, to why shouldn't you move to cloud? And it's not, does it work on a mobile, it should be mobile first. And now this conversation is moving this to, why can't somebody do it from home, as opposed to it has to be done from the office? So I think even just the relative flip of the context of setting up the question seems to be changing. That's why it surprised me that so few people think that it's going to go back. It clearly, especially as this goes on for a while, new behaviors become habits and they become normalized and hopefully, the senior management pays attention to the outcome and again, not this activity which is really not, that's not what you want people to do, you want them to actually get stuff done. >> Jeff and Amy, the other thing I was going to say is, Amy, when you look at the report that Citrix has put out, how many people are even going to be able to go back to work when kids aren't going back to school? And then we have summer, piggybacking onto that, so now you've got parents who have kids at home, what is that outlook? To me, it's not just this simple, okay, it's over, let's get back to work guys, because the rest of our life has completely shifted as well. >> That was actually my conversation today, is starting to really think about holistically when it comes to policies, programs, what are we putting in place for the summer? And not only that, but even some of our employees who have been alone through this, I think at the beginning, there was a very large shift on those who had children or elder care to think about. And at some point, at least in this half of the world, about last week, we really started to hear, worried about this person who's been alone by themselves in their apartment sheltering for over a month. So I think if they start to look at the variety of experiences people are having, really being sensitive to different personas in the organization, different needs, different emotions that are happening and we even start to think about, what does that mean to come back to work? And I know countries and organizations are being very cognizant about doing that. safely, in a very gradual  way of thinking about it, but it starts to get very, very complex very quickly and also from just let's do this well because there's a whole new set. Jeff, you bring up all new set of questions of employees asking, I wasn't allowed to work from home prior, I would like to do that more often now, new conversations with managers about, well, how are we going to measure results? There's a lot of work to be done between now and then, whatever what then is, to really ensure that we help everyone be successful. And I think the conversation we're having, it's likely not going to be one or the other. The new normal is not the old normal and we're not sure what it is but most likely, there's going to be some sort of hybrid working arrangement. Right now, the playing field is leveled and that in and itself is a very different work from home experience. What happens when it's hybrid again and there are some who are remote, some who are in the office, how do we make sure that it's equitable and all the voices have equal opportunity to chime in? Because when people are in the office and their colleague or two is remote, it's not a level of conversation in an organization. So whether that's establishing norms or really just starting to create behaviors where if one person's remote, then everybody's remote no matter if you're in the office or not, you dial in via go to meeting or whatever collaboration tool you're , so all sorts of things to think about, but I guess that is our ecosystem of work is going to change for sure. >> It was so funny in your blog posts, you talked a little bit about that as well. And one of the little paragraphs was, who gets to do it? It's like this binary decision, you can either work from home or you can't. And there's this whole second order impacts that we see on infrastructure, there's nobody in the trains or there's nobody on the freeways. You think, wow, we actually have a lot of freeways if everyone is not on them at the same time. So, begs a lot of questions are why is everybody driving to work at 8:30 in the morning to work on their laptop? Now clearly if you're in construction or service trades and you've got a truck and you got to go do something on site, they have to be there. But I think hopefully what this will do is help people as you're discussing, look at those who can. And even if it's one day a week, two days a week, one day a week, every couple of weeks. The impact on infrastructure, the impact on traffic, the environment, mental health, Amy, you talked about mental health, sitting in a car for an hour each way, every day certainly is not helping anybody feel better about themselves or get more work done. So I think there are so many benefits if you just look at it in the right context, focused on who can, not who can't and the how and the why and the enabler. But it's really interesting, we've talked a lot about the physical space and the cultural space. Imagine if this happened in 2006, before the iPhone came out, the smartphone. Think of the crazy amount of tools that we do have. I mean right now, we're talking and we spread out all over the country. So we're actually in a really fortunate space in terms of the digital infrastructure that we have in place to enable these things. And I know Citrix, you guys have been in the lead of supporting this forever, now even have a whole set up of resources, what's it called, the Citrix Remote Work Hub for people to get resource to figure out everything from the mental health to the WiFi connectivity, to all these other little things as Tamara said, how do you manage the kids and the dog and your significant other that also has Zoom meetings that they have to attend? So it's so many resources that people need to use and not feel uncomfortable that they're alone and could use a little bit of an assist. >> Absolutely well said. When this quickly became a forced experiment to work remote, Citrix has 30 years of history helping enable successful remote work in a secure way and the first thing that we wanted to do was be of service. So pulling together these resources has been a big project and we're so glad to be able to provide this tool set and we truly do hope that it makes this transition stronger, better, it will continue to grow and to evolve even as our own experiences evolve, new challenges arise, but we definitely want to keep it fresh and keep meeting the need that's out there, both internal for Citrix as much as in as long as we've been doing, we don't have it all figured out, we are learning too, this is unchartered territory for everyone, but also to take what we are learning and put it out there in a very transparent way. >> Right, I want to-- >> You know, I was-- >> Go ahead, Tamara. >> Sorry, but there was just something so crazy, Jeff, about the study that Citrix put out. And Amy, I wanted to bring this up to you because you said they're coworkers like, well, so-and-so lives alone, I wonder if they're okay or if they're lonely. But in the study, barely a quarter of the individuals reported any loneliness. I find that to be pretty shocking. >> It is shocking and I think it really speaks to how quickly those happy hours, the Zoom Happy Hours or the gatherings and some of the creativity that started to pop up, but yeah, you made a great point, Tamara, that was surprising and I'm curious if that will continue to be the case. (murmurs) >> But I guess maybe some of us when we got home, we were like, wow, this isn't so bad after all. And then can you imagine? So Jeff, if only 28% of people experienced any loneliness, imagine when you can have peace and quiet in your home again and still work. I think that this really is a lot more delicious than a lot of us anticipated it would be. And, what a grand social science experiment this has been! It's phenomenal. >> The fact that everyone is experiencing it at the same time globally just blows my mind. I was here for the earthquake, I was in Portland for Mount Saint Helens, I've been through a few little things here and there, but those are still regional, there's still a safe space, there's still people that don't have that story. Everyone, six or 7 billion people will have a where were you in March, 2020 story, which is fascinating. And then as you said, it's not only the work from home, there's no time to plan and no time to put infrastructure and, oh by the way, the kids are home too, and school is also from home. So in terms of an accelerant, it's just gasoline on the fire. But I want to jump in a little bit about one of the things you talked about Amy and you'll take camera 'cause you're doing it in your own company, and is in terms of establishing norms. I think people are maybe not thinking about the fact that they either need to establish new norms or they need to be very clear on the communication of what the norms are so that everybody is as you said Amy, feels comfortable in this new space because we have norms at work and now we have to have these new norms and there's all kinds of funny stuff going on in terms of we talked about dogs and kids, that this and that dressed, you're not dressed, you put makeup on, it's funny in the survey, do you take a shower? Only 30 some odd people take a shower every day, which I thought was kind of-- unexpected >> What about the shoe comment? Did you believe that, Jeff, where people actually would wear their shoes to their death? Well, I'll tell you, they didn't ask the women because the women would not be wearing high heels at home if they didn't have. >> They didn't specify which shoes, Tamara, they just said shoes. So maybe the more comfortable flats were the ones that were coming out. But I'm just curious on establishing social norms. Tamara, I'll let you go first, how did you establish them? Was it hard to do? Did they self self-generate and as a leader, do you have to police it or is it self policing? How's that working? And then Amy, from your point in terms of formal communication in a much bigger organization and being part of the HR office, one might say, isn't that already part of HR's charter? But how's that different now? Tamara, I'll let you go first. >> Sure, it's a great question because since we do have a remote workforce, one of the most salient things that I found to be critically important for productivity and collaboration and even cohesion and decreasing those silos between business unit is making sure that we form a community. And so what I mean by that is we have and always have had, we've been using video conferencing since before the pandemic and we have video conferencing meetings where video is on, so that's one of the parameters, is everybody needs to see everyone else's faces, and we have a morning kickoff meeting, an all hands meeting and then we have an end of week one as well and part of that piece, we call a standup where people either share something that's either a challenge within their workplace or with a customer or even in their own personal life, and then they end on something to celebrate because I think it's really important for us to cultivate that. But it really helps the teams to get to know one another. So just because someone in this business unit doesn't work with someone in this business unit, they know one another because of these team meetings that we have. And so I think creating a culture of positivity and collaboration versus competition and creating a culture where people feel a part of a team and a part of something bigger and where they see that their contribution makes a difference to the whole, creates a really delicious community that helps people feel valued at work. And I think with a remote workforce, you have got to pay attention to how you are creating that community and that feeling and sense of value to each and every individual within the organization. >> It's a very different kind of a challenge. Amy, your thoughts on more of a formal approach to establishing social norms to some of these big organizations, or do you treat it differently as a big organization or is it just a bunch of small little clusters of people that work together? >> I have so many thoughts on this, so I would love to have a two hour dialogue with both of you on this topic. Couple thoughts, there's implicit norms that develop organically, and then there's the explicit ones which for whatever reason we seem more hesitant to have very explicit conversations about norms. I don't know if people think it's tedious or something like that, I'm not sure, I haven't done that research yet. But in times of transition, it's so incredibly important just even for efficiency to add certainty, to make sure that everyone has the same message, same expectation to lean a little more heavily on the exquisite norms. Talking about how do we want to begin our meeting, let's reserve the first 10 minutes and just catch up like we would in the hallway. Some of that is a shift to how those meetings probably were happening two months ago. So making sure that everyone understands is that expectation and even little bit more of a warmup question. How's everybody feeling today? And even getting more specific, there is a couple of organizational gurus who I have been following quite a bit lately, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, Aaron wrote a book called "Brave New Work" and they also have a podcast, but they really talk about the organization as an operating system. And when we look at norms, the norms are so much a part of that operating system and getting really clear about who does what here. There're things like how are not taken, how are we following up, in our current climate, who's checking on who? And so having some of those explicit conversations I think are incredibly important. And also for me with some of the work that I've been doing over the last six weeks is trying to harness goodness across the globe. So we have a group of site leaders who meet twice a week, their charge is to look after their location. So every location in the Citrix ecosystem that has more than 20 employees has a designated site leader during this time. And in bigger sites, they have pulled together committees, they're doing things that are local level to keep that site engaged, but what we're also looking to do is harness the best of the best. Some really amazing things, I did a radio calisthenic last night with our team in Tokyo. So something very true and personal to the Japanese culture but other sites, they're doing coffee chats and having drop-ins, celebrity guests, organizational leaders that are pretty high profile just popping in and out actively to have a very authentic Q&A conversations. There's some really inventive ideas to keep people engaged and also possibly establish new norm and I think that the question for me is, what do people like so much that they decide that it stays in place? When we do have of that thing and people are in the office more often, what level of connectivity will we keep? Even, will people start showering every day again? Some of these things, who knows what's going to happen? >> You make me want to go down to a to RNB and look in the meeting rooms at Intel, they used to have a very defined meeting, culture meeting, process meeting establishment, super efficient just like they're making chips. I wonder if they've changed a little bit in light of what's going on, but final note in terms of frequency and variety of communications. Both of you now have mentioned in the communications with your people and what you're hearing about is one is, you got to increase the frequency just period. And in fact, you might actually be communicating more frequently 'cause you don't necessarily chat all the time in the hallways when you're physically together. And the other thing that strikes me is the variety. It's not just the meeting, it's not just information exchange, it's touching base with community, it's establishing deeper relationships, it's doing some social things that, kind of the variety and the frequency of direct communication person to person, just not necessarily closer than six feet within one another has to go up dramatically, and is, as you're seeing in best practices in this new world. Amy, why don't you go first? >> I'm seeing a lot more Slack usage, we are an organization that has a multitude of tools to choose from, Slack being one of them, but highly engaged Slack community. The other thing that's become very clear as an insight is the more authentic the communication, the better. So our CEO, David Henshall has been doing video pieces and they had become increasingly more personal about whether it's his space where he exercises what he's doing for exercise, and the employee response has been deep appreciation for feeling several degrees more connected to our senior leadership. Other senior leaders on the team have profiled their own work from home antic in a very humorous way and so just finding inventive ways to leverage the communication vehicles we have, but at a level that is very true to the situation we're in and very human at their core. >> So Tamara, let me ask you a followup on that. You're big on social, it's a big part of your business helping other companies do better at social and engage in social, and it strikes me, especially in the real senior leadership ranks, there are those who tweet just to pick a platform, like Michael Dell, Sanjay Poonen, some CUBE alumni that you know, and then there's some that don't. And again, we talked about the contrast of IBM now, Ginny didn't tweet now, the new CEO announces it on LinkedIn. When you talk to CEOs and leaders about getting involved in social, I'm sure a lot of them that don't do it, just say the risk reward is not there, why am I going to expose some little personal tidbit of myself when the potential harm is great? But as we just heard from Amy, people like to know who the person is, people want to relate to who the person is. That's kind of part of the whole CUBE thing that we figured out a long time ago, is people are interested in the people that are behind the technology in the companies in the implementation. So how do you advise people, what do you see to convince them that, hey, it's actually in your best interest to show a little vulnerability, to show a little humanity, to maybe be scared sometimes and not necessarily have the right answer? How do you help coach them that these are good things, not bad things? >> It's so brilliant you brought this up, Jeff, because with the pandemic, a lot of the executives that were not on social media all of a sudden wanted to be on social media, and how do I do this, and how do I set up my thought leadership? Because this was a very primary mode of communication. And I think what we're seeing is that you do see a lot of the progressive CEOs and executive members on social media and then what you've outlined is there was a hesitancy by a lot of the CEOs who come from a different paradigm in which the hierarchal structure was such that they got to this level and why do I need to be on social media? And what we're seeing is that this push from the younger generational cohorts, which is they don't really see that hierarchal structure at all, and they want to be able to communicate with their CEO as much as they want to communicate with their manager. And when they can't, there is this distrust and you brought up the trust piece, which is huge. And I do know that a lot of global business leaders in highly regulated industries have been afraid, like in the financial services industry because there are a lot of rules and regulations. So I can understand and appreciate their hesitancy to be on social media, which is like a bit of the wild West. And you see those that are really pretty insulated from anything that they do, you can see like Elon Musk can tweet whatever he wants to tweet, and a lot of executives don't feel that they have that same sort of freedom. And so how we work with them, we work in the B2B and enterprise space is about what is it that you want to be known for? What is it that you're passionate about that would, Amy's point, be uplifting to those who not only work internally, your internal stakeholders, but to even your customers or those on the external, and stick to that? So no, you don't need to tweet about your political feelings, you don't need to tweet about sensitive subjects. We always say stay away from politics and religion, but you can absolutely establish a very authentic transparent, vulnerable thought leadership about the things that you care about. And we say pick three things. What three things do you want people to think of when you're not in the room? Pick three adjectives and then construct your editorial calendar, what you're doing on social media around how those three things are going to come to life. Through all of your email? Through your videos that you share with your community? And also what you're talking about on LinkedIn, Twitter and no, I'm not advising any of the executives to get on TikTok, but I do advise them to be on LinkedIn and Twitter. >> Matt Eastwood is starting to play with TikTok, so I don't know if you follow him on that, but he's a budding Casey Neistat. So I think he's getting into the TikTok thing, or even just TikTok edits, it's great. We could go on and on and on, and I really appreciate the time and it's just interesting again, pulling from Amy's blog post about leadership and you lead with trust, accountability, vulnerability, inclusion and communication. I think those are all human things and I think are so important. So final word, assuming things are going to get better in let's just say a year from now, we get back together and talk about how the new way to work has changed in a post COVID world, what do you hope that we'll be talking about that's different a year from now than we are today? Beyond obviously the COVID itself? Amy, you first. >> Wow. To narrow that down, I hope we are talking about how organizations have invested in helping our people find their strengths and feed with resilience and to understand what it is that helps them operate at their best, no matter what situation that you're in. >> That's great. Tamara? >> Me, Jeff, I'm going to hope that we are talking about the technology that's available a year from now that's going to help us have a much more immersive experience remotely working. So we'll be talking about hopefully things like the haptic internet, well that haptic interface with tactile internet and how AR, VR and mixed reality settings will help us as remote authors to feel like we're actually in meetings and having the same sort of experience that oftentimes we think we get only when we're at the building with everybody else. So I hope we're talking about how technology is really moving the needle forward to helping our remote workforce have that same experience and camaraderie and team building that they do in the physical space. >> Great. Well and again, there's this digital is different than physical, we're not together physically and we can't be right now, but we're together digitally. And so it's not the same, it's different, but there's a lot of good things about it too. So thank you both for taking the time, this has been a really great conversation. Amy, I agree with you, we could go for another couple of hours, but I think the crew would start throwing things at me. So I think we'll have to cut it off here. Thanks again and stay safe and really appreciate the time. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for tuning in, thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend coming to you from our second day of coverage, Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta. We are very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, the SVP of EMEA for Citrix, Sherif Seddik. Nice to have you on theCUBE. >> Fantastic, thank you very much for having me here. It's great. >> Our pleasure, so we have spoken the last, almost two full days here, on set, with a whole bunch of your executives, customers, analysts. The excitement over, not just the Citrix Workspace intelligent experience, but the announcements of deepening partnerships with Microsoft and Google are so exciting. >> Absolutely, I mean, we are very thrilled with kind of the, I was actually talking to David Henshall, our CEO, earlier today, and I was going, "We just announced so much stuff. I'm not sure everybody grasps everything that we announced." So it's exciting times for us, as you said, from an innovation point of view, from a speed to market point of view, and definitely partnerships. >> Yeah, I would love to hear, I mean. The deepening partnership with Microsoft, the Google announcements, the intelligent experience, and I. Zero-in on this announcement with Microsoft. This is like something that has been pent up demand. The ability to run desktop as a service, Citrix in a cloud, specifically Microsoft's, because there's a lot of overlap in partnership. What have customers been more excited about? Getting this pent up demand and answering for this partnership with Microsoft? Or are they surprised, in that intelligent experience, both very exciting announcements. >> Well I think what we're getting most excitement about is really the intelligent workspace because every customer that I talk to these days has an employee experience project going on. They all call it different things, but it's really focused about that. How can we get our employees to get what they need done as fast as possible? I was talking to customers who are actually starting to measure to the nanosecond, how long does it take an employee to launch app A or app B et cetera? So that's really the thing that customers are more excited about. The fact that they can give their employees such a beautiful, consumer-like experience, that guides them through their work, is really, customers are seeing it as a game changers for what they can do for their employees. >> And that's an enabler, well it's essential, for to have a great employee experience, directly affects your customer experience. >> Absolutely, and actually, what I tell many of our customers is you should look at the employees as your customers because if your employees are happy, they're going to make your customers happy. And the statistics, and the studies recently have been quite staggering about employee experience. You see the Gallup result from a couple of years ago that said, companies with engaged employees have 20% higher sales, 21% higher profitability, but the reverse of that was that only 20% of the employees were really engaged. Nearly 20% were actively disengaged. So the companies that can really flip that dynamic, can achieve growth and business results, and as you said, greater, greater customer experience. >> I'm also really interested in this unique balance, when it comes to customer experience and employee experience. You're in EMEA, so, there's a great, I think, distrust between big companies, especially big American companies, and data. In order to deliver the experience, you need data. What have been the conversations with your customers as you help to ensure them that Citrix definitely respects their data, GDPR and all of that, but the exchange of data for value is definitely there. >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key things is every customer conversation now has a deep analysis of data and the data flows and where do they go. And we've taken great steps. So, we've, one of the first investments that we made in the cloud was creating a control plane in Europe, in that space, in Amsterdam. So that we make sure the data is available in Europe, within the EU, et cetera. But on top of that, we also don't keep a lot of data, in our cloud environments. We just focus on, what do we need to make sure that it's the right employee, the right user, and that they only get access to the things that they get access to. But it's every customer conversation. They want to understand, "Tell us exactly, which pieces of data do they keep? And where do you keep them? And how long do you keep them for?" and all that. So, we've invested a lot of resources into making sure that we comply with all of the different European rules. And as you said, there's GDPR now, that's an umbrella, but in Europe, some countries have some. >> They go deeper? >> Yeah, they go deeper than that. And we make sure that we work with our customers, to make sure that we give them every level of comfort around privacy and data privacy. >> So you talked about the customers being very excited about the intelligent experience. The news that the capabilities that it's really going to bring the actions to the user. So really what we've heard and felt in the last 24 hours is, Citrix really pivoting towards the general user. But I'd love to get your perspective on EMEA customers influence on the development of the intelligent experience. How vocal have they been? How, especially because, if you just even look at compliance and standards alone, there's so many. Talk to us about that feedback loop that your customers in EMEA have had. >> It's been fascinating. A couple of years ago, I was visiting one of the largest French banks, and a big of that conversation, they were actually talking to me about, "How are you thinking about virtual assistance in the workplace?" And kind of, "How are you going to bring that in?" And, "Where does that fit with your whole focus on giving customers choice? Are you giving us choice on that? How will you integrate that?" So, customers, as I said, are very, very focused on how to take advantage of that. And the big difference in EMEA I guess, is always that balance between, okay, how do we make sure that we're continuing to enhance the experience that we provide our users with the capabilities? And at the same time, making sure that we are compliant. However, the other interesting thing is the speed at which some of the customers themselves changed. Again, I met a particular customer two years ago, and they were like, "We are in an unregulated industry. We are never going to do BYOD. We are never going to allow our users to work from home." And I met the same person, you know, 12 months later, and it was "BYOD is our new standard. We've even allowed our traders to do some work from home." So that shift in perceptions and actions that our European customers are taking, has been phenomenal over the last 18 months. >> That's a pretty fast turnaround, from no BYOD, everybody needs to be on site, to we have got to deliver an experience our employees need. What do you think were some of the catalysts for a shift of that magnitude in the course of 12 months? >> I think the biggest thing is probably the war for talent, if you like, among organizations. And everybody's thinking, you know, whatever data you look at again, there are employee shortages, there are skill shortages. So, with Generation Y and Generation Z coming into workplace, they are very demanding. It's interesting how many customers are saying now that, one of the questions that employees or potential employees ask when they are coming in is "What are the tools that you're going to give me? Can I choose whatever device I want?" et cetera. So that's the first thing. The second thing has been, things like, pragmatic things, like costs of real estate, and kind of how do we optimize that, and that drives certain things. And if you can get them comfortable around the security and the privacy aspects, then they start focusing on these other business benefits that they can get. But I would say, talent attraction is number one. >> So let's talk about kind of your role, your sales role. As you have AEs, Account Executives, and SEs, Sales Engineers, out in the field, having these conversations. This is very volatile, like, you know, I visit this account three months ago, six months ago, and they said no the the intelligent, they were at Citrix, they said no to the intelligent workspace. They were no to BYOD. How do you prepare your staff to be, for the volatility in conversations? >> I think one of the first things, other than the staff, is I think we have a very unique position around that, enabling the customer choice. So because we are definitely very very much on that, it's going to be hybrid cloud. Customers need get the choice of deploying the technology in the cloud or on premises. Regardless of the customer position, we always have a solution that we can offer. And as long as we are very clear on, okay, if you go this option, these are some of the capabilities you're going to miss about. So that enables a continuous conversation with the customer. However the other thing that we are driving with our teams, is really focus on the business outcomes that the customer is driving for. And as you focus on that, then you can get customers to change their view. But just make sure, the other thing is, we want all of our employees to really understand deeply, the security and privacy concerns that the customers have and be able to respond to these. Because once we, in here actually, yesterday, we had a meeting with one of the large European telcos. And the meeting started with, "Okay, we're not going to do cloud." And once we explained to them, okay, let's walk you through our data flow. Let's walk you through what we keep. And then "Ah, we didn't realize it was like this. Then maybe." They didn't say, yes, we're going to move forward, straight away, but it opened a conversation, and that's the key of what we need our teams and sellers, is focus on the customer. Focus on the business side of things. >> And within those customer conversations, employee experience, we're hearing more and more, is being elevated to a C-suite imperative. Are you starting to see more meetings with CIOs, Chief People Offices, Chief Marketing Officers? Is that opening up opportunities for your sales guys and gals to really educate the executive management team at a company, rather than traditionally, IT? >> Yeah, I think absolutely. It's interesting because, particularly when we start to talk about the intelligent workspace and saying, you know, general purpose and being able to. Many of our CIOs can say "That's great, but this is not a decision that I can take on my own," if that's what we're talking about. "So let's, we have to bring our HR teams into play, we have to bring our business owners into play." And there is now becoming this "Let's go together." So they are now becoming, opening the doors for us to go and talk to the business leaders because that is what is required to make a decision that impacts every employee, not just a small fraction. >> Wow, so that's a huge cultural shift, internally, to your sales team. You know, I'm used to engaging Citrix's sales team and talking about, well this VDI capability is available in this product. This isn't available in this product. Checklist, checklist, checklist. The conversation of shifting to having a business outcome conversation is very different. You know, one day, your team may go in and talk to HR, another day they may go in and talk to marketing. It is a skillset beyond any single team. How are you guys adjusting to that business outcome conversation? And preparing your team, and giving them the tools from an employee experience, to go out and have this multitude of conversations. >> We're doing a number of things. We're doing a lot of training and enablement. So one of the things that we do, (cough) is we're doing training around talking to business people. And what we do is we actually bring business owners from the customer to educate our teams. Sorry, my voice is going. >> No problem. >> What is important for them? What's the priorities? What are the languages that they use? But the other thing that we're actually doing, is we're encouraging our teams to talk to their colleagues, because we have HR professionals in our organization. We have finance professionals in our organization. We have marketing professionals. Go talk to them, and bring them to your customers with you because they will really be talking the business language. So these are a couple of the key initiatives that we are doing, to enable our teams to have these conversations. >> That's brilliant. We had a conversation yesterday with your Chief People Officer, Donna Kimmel, kind of just about that, in terms of looking at the employee experience not just as the applications I'm interacting with to do my job, but starting up the chain to even recruiting. And needing to have the right, I can't even think of it, the right, a job description that's attractive. But like you were saying, and I've been doing this with some of my clients, what kind of tools am I going to have? Can I bring my own tools? So the employee experience kind of starts up the chain, if you will, more so than I thought. I kind of really narrowly focused it on once I'm onboard, and the onboarding process. And then getting to making sure that that's seamless, and me knowing beforehand, as a new employee, these are the tools that you're going to have, and knowing that a company, like with what Citrix is doing with intelligent experience, is going to be able to look at my behavior and my interaction with the different applications and help tailor that experience, is game changing. Because the employee experience is directly related to the customer experience. They are inextricably linked. We all know, disgruntled employees can be, especially with social media these days, very vocal and very impactful. And wanting them to be impactful in the best way possible. So, really smart, to hear that you're bringing in more of your line of business leaders, to articulate that value. It just makes perfect sense. >> Yeah, and it's actually broadening the horizon of everybody, because we've told our HR people, you need to be able to talk about our technology and how it enables you to do your best work. And at the same time, through these interactions, our sales teams, who as you said, who come more from a "we understand the technology" background, are learning about all of these different parts of the business, and it's even driving more, closer working relationships within our own organization, as well, so it's benefiting every aspect of what we do. >> I can see that, and also I mean, you know, we talked with so many companies, and I, one of the challenges that they have, that they probably don't even address very often is how many of our people, that work for us, can actually articulate what it is we do? And the impact that we have to customers. The voice of the customer is so potent. We've talked with all three of the Innovation Award finalists, all different industries, but all making huge strides to make that experience for end user employees, and customers, so much better. So even just having those three examples alone. >> Two of them are from Europe, by the way, just to say. >> Yes, yes, Schroders and ZF, we spoke with them, yes. But it's really, I would think a differentiator even from Donna Kimmel's perspective of attracting talent, because people understand and are able to articulate the value, as a Citrix employee, of this is what we do. We use our own stuff, and let me tell you how much more efficient and easy it's made my life. >> And we've also done something else as well, which is now whenever we come up with a new offering in the market, or a new capability in our product, we actually now ask our teams to certify themselves, that they can tell the story. And what we do is we say, you get one of your colleagues to certify. So you go, and you pitch the story to your employee and if they said it's good enough, then you'll get certified and that's becoming a requirement. So we are doing so many things to make sure that everybody in the business is capable of telling, of telling the story. And articulating it from a customer perspective, not from a Citrix out perspective. >> I think we've definitely heard that articulated very well over the last few days. Sherif, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. Very cool that two of those three finalists are from EMEA. >> We are very excited about that. >> We'll be excited to hear tomorrow, who the winner is. >> Looking forward to that. Thank you very much for your time. >> Our pleasure. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, It's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend at day two of theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith, it's great to be back with you. We had a great day yesterday. >> Wasn't it exciting? >> It was. >> And this is surprising. You know, I have to be honest, as a former Citrix customer, and as a watcher of it, David Hansel talked about the 85% of IT budgets goes into keeping the lights on, et cetera, I'd firmly put Citrix in that 85% of a company that produces solutions that basically kept the lights on. They snuck into the other 15% yesterday. It was a really interesting keynote. >> They've made an obvious pivot towards general-purpose users. David also mentioned, and this is something that I didn't know, that most enterprise software, historically, >> which is the one percent of users. And, they are really positioning Citrix Workspace, intelligent experience, for the general purpose user. The marketing managers, the folks in finance, et cetera, who can really leverage this tool, to dramatically, not just simplify their workdays, but they made this really bold promise, yesterday, that Citrix Workspace One, with the intelligence experience, is going to be able to give each person back, a user, one full day a week. That's two months a year back to actually do their jobs. >> I think I will choose to go on vacation for those two months. >> I'm with ya. >> But one of the things that was consistent, throughout the day was the tone of, one, excitement. All of the analysts, all of the executives we talked to yesterday, very excited about the intelligent experience, but it was, I think, it was more of a abstract thought versus solid, like, this is what the product will do, this is what it looks like, so I'm looking forward to the coming months of seeing the product in action. I could equate it to robotic process automation tools like UiPath and the MiniTools that are out there, but I didn't get a good sense of how deep Citrix is going to go in to robotic process automation, and who would control it. You mentioned the one percent power users. You know when you look at a automation tool, these are tools that are for the one percent, to create these automations, these processes. Will this be something that the Citrix administrators will do on the back end, and then deploy to end users and the app store, similar to how Citrix is deployed today? Or, is this something their going to give users, power-users, the ability to create, so a department team can create a process, an automated workflow, and then deploy that to their team members? I'm strong believer the further you push technology, simple to use to the end-user, the more powerful it becomes, and the more they come up with creative ways to use the technologies. >> And, also, the higher the adoption's going to be. You know, every tech conference we go to, Keith, talks about, you hear the buzzwords, simplicity, frictionless, make it seamless, those all sound great, and yes, of course, as employees of any company, you want that. It's, where does the rubber meet the road? So, I did read, though, that even though the intelligent experience isn't going to be GA until later this year, there are a suite of beta customers. So, I hope we can chat about that with P.J. Hough, their Chief Product Officer, later today to just get a sense of what are some of the impacts that this solution is having on some of these beta customers? Are they seeing significant reductions or increases in workforce productivity, getting towards that, hey, one whole day back? That was the busiest booth, I hear, at the Solutions Expo yesterday. There was a very long line, so the interest, certainly, was definitely peaked, in terms of what they announced yesterday with the audience here. >> So, today's going to be a pretty exciting day of coverage. We're going to talk to, hopefully, a few customers. We're going to talk to P.J., and I'm excited to, kind of, peel back the layers on the announcement around the intelligent experience. Then, we cap off the day with talking to their CTO, Christian Reilly, who, you know, is always fun. So, one thing that we didn't talk a lot about today, you know, KubeCon is happening in Europe, the team is there covering that show. And we didn't talk much cloud, yesterday. While there was announcements around Azure and Google Compute Platform, we didn't get in to, kind of, the details of that, so I'm looking forward to talking to Christian later on today about how is Citrix relevant to the cloud conversation? This whole future of work, we can't talk about the future of work without talking about cloud. >> Absolutely. I know that their cloud revenue is up, but you're right, that isn't something that we got in to yesterday. We really focused a lot on , with our spectrum of guests, on the employee experience. >> Mm hmm >> And, also, got a really broad definition, you know. Employee experience isn't just about when I log in, as a manager, on all of the different tasks that I need to do before I can actually start my function. It starts back, up and to the left, when you even start recruiting for talent. >> Right. >> And, that was, eyeopening to me is they're right, it encompasses the end to end. I kind of thought of it as a marketing funnel, where you're nurturing prospects in to leads, converting them in to opportunities. And then, one of the most important things on the marketing funnel, that's very similar here, is turning those customers in to advocates. Same thing on the employee experience side, is turning those employees in to empowered users that are happy because they're able to be productive and do their jobs appropriately. And then, of course, their business has nurtured them well enough that they retain that top talent. >> We did get, at least, one customer on, yesterday. We talked to Adam Jones, the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer of the Florida Marlins. I got a opportunity to get a dig in on the Chicago Cubs, so that's always a fun thing. But, even from a customer's perspective, Adam brings the COO lens. So usually you're over HR, you're over vendor partnerships, et cetera, he talked about the importance of, one, giving his employees a seamless experience, so he talked about the employee experience, and, overall, keeping the motivation factor high. Speaking of motivation, we learned a new term yesterday, ToMo. >> Love that term. >> Total motivation? What was it? >> Yeah, total motivation. >> Total motivation, so I'm definitely going to look at my ToMo score for the couple of contractors I have on my staff. (laughing) Or at least try and develop one. I thought it was a great, a great, great acronym, but, more importantly, I think organizations are starting to understand. Employee satisfaction, employee experience equates to outcomes when it comes to customer experience. >> 100% >> If your employees are not having a great experience, we talked about onboarding experiences yesterday. If that isn't happening, then chances are, there's a direct correlation between customer experience and employee experience. >> It's a huge risk that companies can't ignore. Employee experience is essential. We talked, yesterday, like you said, about every employee engagement has some relation back to the customer. >> Right. Whether you're in marketing, and you're creating collateral to nurture prospects, or you're in finance, or legal, or you're in the contact center, you're a touchpoint to that customer. And so, you're experience, as an employee, they need to foster those relationships to turn those employees in to advocates. Because the customers, for whatever product or service you're delivering, 'cause we have so much choice these days. The ability to go, "Nope, this isn't working." "I'm going to go find another vendor "who can deliver this service." is a big risk, and so, we were talking to Maribel Lopez yesterday, of Lopez Research, you could really hear her passion in the research that she's done on the future of work. We talked about employee experience, to your point, absolutely critical for customer satisfaction. Employee experience is really essential for digital transformation because businesses really can't transform, successfully, if the employees aren't productive, aren't satisfied, and able to adapt to changing culture as a business digitizes itself. >> As we talk about that other 15 to 20% of innovation, it's odd that we're having this employee experience conversation at Citrix. Citrix isn't a HR software company, let alone a HR company, and we talked to David about this in the opening. How do they transition from just having this conversation with IT administrators, which is the primary audience, here, at Citrix Synergy, to having this conversation with CEOs, CIOs, CMOs, CDOs, the COOs, other C-suite executives. Does Citrix belong at the table, versus these traditional companies we think of? The management consultant firms, who specialize in HR and employee experience, or even other software companies, like SAP with HRM. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the executives that we talked to yesterday, had an experience with SAP. So, Citrix is, absolutely, going about this in a prescribed manner and injecting this culture in to their company. >> I agree with you. We talked to their Chief People Officer and EVP, Donna Kimmel, and with a number of other guests, about the employee experience being a C-level, not just a conversation topic, but an imperative. Because, all of the cogs need to be functioning in the same direction for this company to move forward, and as I mentioned earlier, as every product and service has competition, us consumers, whether we're consumers of commercial products, or technology buyers, we have choice. >> Right. >> And, so, an organization needs to bake in to their culture, the employee experience, in order to ensure that its survival rate and its competitive advantage can go, 'cause we actually did talk about talent attraction and retention as a competitive advantage. And Citrix has done a good job of, you're right, not producing technology for HR, but really being able to speak to that business case being horizontal across any type of organization. >> I thought it was a really interesting point, or at least something that I thought about yesterday, at Citrix, again, we have a bunch of network administrators, system administrators, VP of Infrastructures, that is the traditional audience. A lot of times, we can fill abstracted. That audience can feel abstracted from the business. When you're a call center, when you're in sales, when you're actually touching customers, employee experience, obviously, makes sense then. But, I thought the demonstration with the marketing manager really helped this audience connect with more of those frontline employees and helping to improve their experience and bringing meaning to that traditional network or sysadmin job. You know, when you feel like you're absolutely moving the productivity ball forward. This is generational. Adam Jones of the Marlins said that he's in a generational opportunity. To affect change, administrators will find themselves in a generational opportunity to affect change, to move more than just, you know what, we're going to turn knobs, to actually impacting business processes. >> You talk about generational opportunities. One of the things we talked about yesterday is not just that there are five generations in the workforce today, who have differing levels of technology expertise, but, this morning in the Super Session, we got the opportunity to hear from Dr. Madelyn Albright, the 64th Secretary of State of the United States, the first female Secretary of State. And, I loved how she talked about diplomacy, and democracy, and all of the experiences that's she's had in relation to how technology can be an enabler of that. When I Wiki-ed her, I thought, "She's 82 years old." >> 82? "And there's Madelyn Albright, who is still "professing at Georgetown University." I thought that was pretty outstanding. >> You know, you made the point, in our pre-discussion, about she started at Secretary of State, didn't have a computer on here desk, to riding in the driverless car, and obviously, speaking at a technology conference, I thought it was a great testament to where technology has moved, her ability to embrace change, but, more importantly, what it will take. I think she was a model of what it will take. Another interesting point that she made today was trust and knowing whom you're doing business with. We talked about security a awful lot yesterday. Just from a practical technical sense, being able to trust that the person that I'm talking to on the other end of the phone, is actually who they say they are, or on the other end of a transaction. As we start to share data, make the flow of data allow frictionless sharing of data, we need to be able to trust who we're talking to on the other end. She said, any time something happens in the world, the first piece of information she gets is always wrong is her approach to validation. Trust, but validate. I thought there was a lot of great parallels in that to technology. >> I did as well. On the security front, we talked, yesterday, about, not just the digital workspace of Citrix, but what they're doing on the security and the analytics front to really understand and ensure that the data that they're getting off of users interacting through workspace, is ensuring, that, okay, this person is authorized to be in this application and this particular area of this application. What were some of the things that you heard, with respect to security, that you think Citrix is getting it right? Because, as we know, people; number one security threat, anywhere. >> Well, you know, Citrix has, traditionally, been a leader in products like Single Sign-On, the ability to make the technology frictionless. There's a reason why we have a Post-It Note, right here, with the ID, you know. For our user name and password, it's 13 characters, has to be alphanumeric, et cetera, and then it expires every 30 days. That's not frictionless security. Citrix has made waves in Single Sign-On in making sure that the user experience is frictionless, so that security, as users, we don't try and bypass that security. I think that's just a simple concept that organizations should follow. Then, even on the side of analytics, we have Kevin Jackson of >> GovCloud. >> GovNet on, and he talked about how monitoring employees changes their actions. So, as we're collecting analytics and data to automate processes, how Citrix is making it seamless, and in the course of that, anonymizing the data, so that employees don't feel like big brother is watching. >> Yeah. I thought, you know, the more exposure I get, through theCUBE, to different technologies, the more I've changed my perspective on that. Is it big brother watching me? >> Right. >> Even in call centers, when, this call may be recorded, you think, "Oh, great." Actually, they're using that data, to your point, as Kevin talked about yesterday, its anonymized, but the goal is to make the product and service and communications better. And another thing that it can facilitate, where Citrix is concerned, is making that workspace and that employee experience personalized. >> Yeah. >> Which is what we all expect as consumers. When we go on Amazon, and we want to buy something, we don't want them to show it again. We expect that they know. I've already bought this, maybe service something to me that would be a great addition to whatever I bought. We want that personalized experience to make our lives easier, and that personalization is another big element that they talked about delivering yesterday. And the security and the analytics, I think, are two pieces that can be facilitators of that. Could just also be, sort of, a messenger to make sure more of the users understand the anonymization and how that data about their interactions are actually going to make their experiences better. >> I bought a new laptop, by Microsoft, a week ago, and I was on Facebook, and all of the sudden, I got a ad from Microsoft on Facebook about laptop and laptops accessories. At first, I thought, "Wow, that's weird." But, that may be the first Facebook ad I've ever clicked on because that actually added value. While I felt a little strange about them knowing that I bought a new laptop, Facebook gave me the option to find out how did the ad get served up. Well, Microsoft uploaded a HashSet of email addresses, and my Surface purchase came up, and actually it added value. I was like, "Okay, I can find out what "other material." So, at the end of the day, when you're transparent about what you're doing, and you inform users, and you add value, the end of the day's the key part, you have to add value, doesn't help to advertise Surface laptops after I already bought one. Now, and to, that next stage, to show me accessories and make my experience, my relationship with Microsoft even better, is a great example of that. >> Exactly. Jeff Fritz calls that the line between being creepy >> Yes. >> and being magic, but I like how you add that part of that magic is adding value. >> Exactly. >> 100%. Well, Keith, I'm excited for today. We have, you mentioned, P.J.'s on today, Calvin Hsu is also on today. We're going to be talking with the three Innovation Award nominees. That's a very cool, kind of, American Idol-style voting process, where the public can vote on the Innovation Award winner, which will be announced tomorrow. So, excited about everything we're going to talk about today, and, as you mentioned, we're capping things off today with Christian Reilly, CTO, who we already see, through Twitter, is very excited to be theCUBE with us. >> All right. >> All right, have a great day, yeah? >> Yes. >> All right. >> Let's get to it. >> That's a deal. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and, again, we are live at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia. Keith and I will be back with our first guest after a break.