>> 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)