>> 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: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Alto studios for a CUBE Conversation. We're talking about the Citrix Workspace Summit. It happened earlier today. And we've got one of the experts in the field, CUBE alumni and always a really fun guest to have on. Let's give a welcome to Tamara McCleary. She's coming to us from Colorado. She's the CEO of Thulium but you know her from social media and seeing her at all the conferences and speaking. And Tamara, it's great to see you again >> Jeff, it's so good to be here. Hey, next best thing to being in person, right? >> Absolutely. I mean, there is some good stuff. Neither of us had to get on an airplane today and we were able just to connect via the magic of the internet, which I think people forget how magic it truly is. So I looked up, we last spoke, it was mid-April. We were about a month into this thing after the kind of shutdown. And really the topic there was about this light switch moment on the work from home front. Now we're seven months into this, eight months into this, and clearly it's not going away anytime soon. And even when it does, it's not going to go back exactly to the way it was. So first off, how are you doing? 'Cause I know you spend a lot of time at conferences and traveling all over the world, so your life's been changed quite a bit. And then two, just your kind of perspective as we've moved from the light switch moment to the, that this is the new normal and will be the new normal going forward. Maybe not exactly how it is today, but we're not going back to the way that it was before. >> You couldn't be more spot on, Jeff. In fact, when you said April, to me, it almost feels like not seven months. It feels much longer ago. And since the last time I got on an airplane was the end of February, and that was a huge disruption to me in my life. I had always been in three, four cities a week, every week, and haven't traveled on an airplane since February. So the world is different, and it has shifted, and there's no going back. We can't step in the river twice and hit that same spot. I totally messed up that quote, but that's me. You're used to that already. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> But some things don't change. But I think when we look at work, and what we were talking about back in April is that now we're looking at the potential for kind of a hybrid approach, whether we're talking about work or even kids, some kids going back to school, there's a hybrid approach. And with that comes its own set of complexities that we have to consider. So not only has the culture shifted into a place where you have your workforce who has gotten used to working remotely, and there's a lot of things with working remotely that we didn't have when office was the centrical focus for the workplace. So there's a lot of flexibility when you work from home. And I think one of the interesting things with the Citrix Workspace Summit was when CEO David Henshall talked about how it's the people, right? So it's our workforce, our employees who are our most valuable, but also our most costly assets. So we have to make sure that the employee experience is one that is pleasing and helps us to have not only talent acquisition, but also talent retention in a really dynamic, competitive atmosphere. And I'm sure I just posed this question so we could go a million different places with this. Where do you want to go with it, Jeff? >> Well, I was going to say, and of course we can go forever, and we don't have forever, so at some point we'll have to stop talking at the end of this interview. But I just love having you on. And what I want to drill in is as we've talked about the new way to work for a very, very long time. This is not a new topic. And we've had remote work tools and we've had VPNs and we've had mobile phones now since 2007, but we didn't have this forcing function, and I think that's what's really different here is that now it wasn't a choice anymore. There was no more planning and talking about it and maybe or maybe not. Work from home was kind of a first-class citizen in terms of priority. COVID changed all that dramatically overnight. And it's driven home this other kind of concept which we talk a lot about generically in terms of the customer experience as they interact with our applications, which is the way that now they actually interact with the company. And we've talked a little bit about new way to work, but now it's really driven to the forefront, because as you said, there's a lot of benefits from working from home. You could eat dinner with your family, maybe can pick up a few more of the kids' activities, whether it's a sports game in the middle of the afternoon or something in the evening, but there's also a lot of stress. There's a lot of kind of this always on and this constant notifications, whether it's coming from email or text or Slack or Teams or Asana or whatever. So refocusing on the employee experience and elevating that up into a much more important thing, as you said, for both wellness and employee satisfaction, but also retention and getting new employees. It's really changed the priority of that whole set of, kind of point of view around the employee experience that wasn't there kind of pre-COVID. >> Absolutely. And I think you just tapped onto something that I think affects all of us who are juggling these multifaceted lives, and that is the constant interruption and distraction, and that costs money. And I think about that as the CEO of our organization is that how many of these distractions could be avoided to create efficiency and productivity. It also creates happiness for the individual. I don't think anybody likes to be constantly distracted, but when you have a bunch of different applications and you don't have them in one accessible place and you're constantly having to flip between these applications, it can cause a lot of friction and frustration. And I think genuinely that was my very first introduction to Citrix was the ability to really streamline and have everything in one place on a beautiful dashboard that was personalized to the individual. Not everybody in the organization needs to have all the applications, right? Some of your employees only need a few, and it just depends on who they are and what they're doing within the organization. And so I think decreasing that friction, making it easier for people, and certainly ensuring not only a frictionless experience at home but also ensuring security is huge. I mean, how many times have we talked about cybersecurity is not a bolt on afterwards. It has to be all the way up through the stack. And certainly we did have an increased threat landscape with work from home situations because there were all these security breaches and issues and vulnerabilities. So I know we're not talking security today, but I'm wild about it. But I think that all of these things, what I like about what Citrix is doing, and I enjoy the Summit, is the fact that they're blending everything into a single solution so that it just gets done. Work gets done from wherever you are, whether you're at home, you're in office, or in your car, work gets done. >> And not only work but I thought the theme that's interesting that came out in David's keynote is our best work. It's good work and high-value work. And there's really kind of two aspects of that. One, as you just said, is please help me with the distractions and use machine learning and artificial intelligence and this unified platform to decide whether I should or should not be distracted. Also help me prioritize what I should be working on kind of right now, which, again, a great opportunity for AI and ML to elevate that which is most important to the top of my inbox. But even more in one of the keynotes was integrating the concept of wellness, and not just wellness in the HR manual at the back after vision and dental and getting your health checks, but wellness even where the application suggests that you take a two-hour window in this particular period of time to be thoughtful and do some deep thinking. And someone mentioned the people we talk about in automation and getting rid of drudgery and errors and all the bad stuff that comes from doing crappy work, not only is it not fun, but super error prone. This is a really different to use technology to help the employee, as you said, not only just get work done, but get good work done, get high-value work done, prioritize good stuff, and not just deal with the incessant henpecking that is the notification world that it's really easy to fall into if you don't turn some of that stuff off or at least tone them down a little bit. >> That's so true. I don't know if you saw this, but there a study by Stanford of, I think it was 16,000 workers, and over a nine-month period, they did this study, and it was a study looking at work from home and whether productivity was increased. And every, 'cause at first you remember what it was, Jeff. I mean, in the old regime, we would thought, oh dear, we don't want a remote workforce because everybody's going to be hanging out in their pajamas and screwing around and not doing work. And that's not true. What ends up happening is that this study showed that productivity increased by 13%. And, I mean, that's huge, right? So there was a huge bump in performance. And in this particular study, the variables that they cited was perhaps that they had a quieter workspace. I mean, you're not getting barraged by all the endless meetings, unless you have endless Zoom meetings, but that's a whole nother conversation. But you're having more time to focus and flexibility on when you work, which also increases focus. But I thought what you mentioned, the wellness piece was important, because then if you look at other studies, there was a Forbes article that cited that the average worker starts at 8:32 a.m. or something like that and works until 5:38 p.m. And I think the days of the week that were the most productive were Tuesday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. But this was interesting, I thought. Telephone calls were up by 230%, so the calls that employees were making, and CRM activity was up by 176% and email up by 57% and chats up by 9%. So what we're seeing is that people are trying to find creative ways to remain connected and communicate, but in different ways. And I think that's where the wellness piece comes in and kind of what you were saying with that. I think it's a microapp that Citrix has on their Workspace, their workspace dashboard that pops up a reminder and says, hey, you think you should take a break or get up from your desk. But I think that what's nice about that is it's easy to get sucked into your computer all day. I'm guilty. I will definitely say I can start off pretty darn early in the morning or usually around by five and go till late at night. But, and it's all in front of the computer screen. So maybe I need that Citrix workspace solution to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to go take a meditation break. >> At least one of those watches that'll tell you to get up and twist around. Well, let's shift gears a little bit. They had Satya Nadella on, and Satya is a phenomenal executive, been super successful turning that big, very large boat, Microsoft, into really a cloud company and a SaaS company, and nothing but great success. Always happy to hear him. He had some interesting comments I want to run by you. One of them he said is we were dogmatic about work before, but don't replace what we were with just a new dogma. And what he really highlighted, A, obviously without the technology platform and cloud and all these tools that we have in place, this couldn't have happened. But more importantly, he said it really highlights the need for flexibility and resiliency, and to really, again, kind of elevate those as the first class citizens as to what you should be optimizing for. And really the highlight within this sudden shift with COVID that if you've got those capabilities, you're going to be successful, and if you don't, you're in real trouble >> I'm glad you brought Satya up, because he also said something really cool that I think is true, and that is we are running right now, currently we are running a global scale experiment. Do you remember him saying that? >> Yeah. >> And it's so true. I think right now the social scientists are going wild because finally they've got their captive collection of their study, their guinea pigs. But the other thing he was saying, too, is that we're going to be harnessing all these technologies to be able to re-skill and up-skill. And how long have we been talking about this, Jeff, with the future of work, that it will be a re-skilling and up-skilling of the workforce. He even mentioned holographic technology. He didn't go into it, but just the mention of it got me thinking about how we are currently using some of those nascent technologies to be able to up-skill and re-skill our workforces and also protect a workforce that doesn't necessarily need to be on scene on the edge of it all. And then he gave an example of an engineer being able to communicate with a first-line worker without having to be actually in the physical presence. And so I think this crucible that we're in called a global pandemic, forcing our hand, really, to do all the things that we've been talking about at all these conferences that we've been to, for me, maybe the past two decades, is that it's show, don't tell. So we're not talking about it anymore. We actually have to do it. And another thing that Satya said was that nine to five is definitely not true anymore with work. It's flexibility. And it's really... He also mentioned this EEG study into meeting fatigue. >> Jeff: Yes. >> I thought it was pretty wild. An EEG study into meeting fatigue. And I bet even without reading that study, all of us who are on video conferencing systems can probably tell what the outcome of that was. But concentration wanes very quickly. In fact, I think in that study it was after 20 minutes. But, so kudos to Citrix for putting on their summits, because did you notice for once we had the enjoyment of all these just really contents, deliciously packed segments that were short. >> Jeff: Right. >> Whereas at live events, they went on way too long. I mean, even customer stories went on way too long. And I really love the staccato nature of these customer stories and partnerships and what was working, and I just thought that they did a really nice job, and it was interesting because it met perfectly with staying underneath that 20-minute window before attention wanes. >> Right, right. And they even broke it up into three conferences, right? It was Citrix Synergy before. >> Right. >> Now it's workspaces, it's cloud, and then the third one will be security. But I want to double down on another concept. We talked about it last time with you and with Amy about measuring work and about kind of old work paradigms in terms of measuring performance that were really based more on activity than output. And this concept that work is an output, not a place. And it kind of makes you think of talking about cloud and a cloud-centric way of thinking about things. It's not necessarily the delivery method. It's about adopting quick change and rapid pace and having everything available that you need anywhere you are at the same time. So it seems strange to me that it took this to drive people to figure out that they should be measuring output and not activity. And were some early applications that came out when this all went down that are going to report back as to how often are you looking at your Zoom calls and how often are you sitting in front of your desk and all this silly stuff that just, again, misses the point. And I think this whole employee experience is, as you said, make 'em happy, make 'em feel fulfilled. They want to do meaningful work. They want to do high-value work. They just don't want to be an integration machine between the email system and the accounts receivable system and the accounts payable system. There's so much of an opportunity to get more value from the people, which, oh, by the way, makes for happier people. So do you think finally we're at a point where we can start getting away from just measuring activity unless that's your job to put a widget on a screw and really focus on output and high-value output and innovative output and deep thinking output versus just checking another box and passing the paper down the line? >> You know, Jeff, that reminds me of what Erica Volini, I think she's global human capital practice at Deloitte. I really loved her presentation. I also like the fact that I felt like she was speaking from her home, and she mentioned she's a new mom, and so there was this warmth and connection there which also I think is something really that we don't think about being, but it is a gift since we've all had to work from home is being able to see kind of executive individuals in a regular environment, and it humanizes it all, right? She said something really interesting in her talk. She was talking about rearchitecting the future of work, and she was talking about essentially, the premise was that human beings need, crave, have to have work that's meaningful and real. And part of this whole experience piece, part of this removing the friction from the experience of the employee and providing opportunities, stimulating growth opportunities for employees to give them that sense of meaning. But also she talked about the relationships. I mean, work is a huge part of the relationships in our life. And so this meaningful relationships and connections and in her architecting the work of the future, it's harnessing technology in service to humans to do a better job. And I think the word she used was augmentation, right? So the augmentation piece would be as we think about reinventing or re-imagining or re-architecting, we look at what's going to happen when we have the human working with the machine, but the machine in service to augmenting that human being to do, potential is what she was talking about, to really reach their potential. And so it's not about being replaced by technology. It's not being replaced by artificial intelligence, with machine learning algorithms. It's actually working in tandem so that technology potentiates the human that is using the technology. And I think that was a really good way of putting it. >> Right, right. I mean, we talk, it's one of our taglines, right? To separate the signal from the noise. And the problem is with so many systems now, and I forget, you may know off the top of your head, the average number of applications that people have to interact with every day to get their job done. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> Too many. >> It's a lot. So, so there is a lot of noise, but there's also some signal. And so if you're not paying attention, you can miss the signal that might be super, super important because you're overwhelmed by the noise. And so I think it is a real interesting challenge. It's a technology challenge to apply the machine learning and artificial intelligence, to sort through the total flow, to be able to prioritize and separate the signal from the noise to make sure we're working on the stuff that we should be working on. And I think it's a growing challenge as we just seem to always be adding new applications and adding new notifications and adding new systems that we have to interact with versus taking them away. So Citrix has this approach where we're just going to bring it all in together under one place. And so whether it's your Salesforce notification or your Slack notification or Zoom meeting, whatever, to have it orchestrated as a single place so I don't have 18 tabs, 14 browsers, and two laptops running just to get my day job done. >> You're going to make me self-conscious of all the tabs I have right now. Thanks a lot, Jeff. But, it's kind of, I like hearing stories, right? I think stories communicate to me kind of these practical applications. And I think Citrix did a brilliant job in the Workspace Summit of highlighting some of these customer stories that were really inspiring during the pandemic. One of 'em was City National Bank and Ariel Carrion? This is a test of my memory. He's the CTO, right, of City National Bank. And he's talking about that they had already had a partial migration to the cloud prior to the pandemic. So obviously there was an advantage for those organizations that already had their toe in the water. So, but when the pandemic hit, then it really catalyzed that movement all the way into the cloud and essentially creating a digital bank. And what was really interesting to me is that they funded 9600 loans and taking on new clients during that time of transformation to a digital bank. And one of the coolest things that he said to me was that in a regular program, it would've taken, mind you, get this. It would've taken 14 years, 14 years to accomplish what they did in three months. >> That's a long time. >> I was blown away, right? Just to me, that speaks a lot, because what we're talking about here is their clients are small business, and who do you think was impacted most during the pandemic? Small business. So the ability to get loans was critically important to the survival of a lot of companies. And the same story they had with eBay and David Lessor was talking, he's a senior manager in the office of the CIO, I think I remember. And he was talking about how obviously eBay is a digital platform, right? But if you think about the pandemic when we were all had these shelter in place orders, lots of people were able to still make money and earn a living because they were able to do business on eBay. And both eBay and City National Bank are obviously customers of Citrix. But I just found this to be really inspiring, because for eBay pre-pandemic, it was like, I don't know. I think they said they had 11,000 connected users prior to the pandemic, and a lot of those were in physical call centers. >> Jeff: Right. >> And then post-pandemic, I think he was reaching, saying end of Q4 was going to be something like 14,000 connected users. That's huge from 11 to 14. >> Yeah. >> And again, to your point, it's kind of forcing our hand into really not only pivoting, but increasing our speed in this ever-changing dynamic environment. >> Right. >> You know, one of the other things that came up, before I let you go, that it's always nice to have frameworks. Sometimes it just helps us organize our thoughts and it's kind of a mental cheat sheet. And they talked about the four Cs, connectivity, content, collaboration, and culture. And I would have to say they're in inverse order of how I would potentially have prioritized them. But I just wanted to zero in on the culture piece, 'cause I don't think people focus enough on culture. And one of the things I think we talked about in April, and I've certainly talked about a number of times going through this thing in leadership in these crazy times is that the frequency and the type and the topics in communication within your internal world have gone up dramatically. I think we had the, we had a CMO on the other day, and she said internal comms, this is a big company, prior to COVID was important, but not that important within the list of the CMO's activity. But then once this thing hit, right, suddenly internal communications, again, in terms of frequency and the types of topics you're talking about and the forums that you talk about and the actual vehicles in which you talk about, whether it's a all hands Zoom call or it's more frequent one-on-ones with your manager, really, really increase the importance of culture, and then I think probably is going to show over time the people that have it right, getting some separation distance from the people that got it wrong. I wonder if you could just talk about, 'cause you're a big culture person and you know how important the people part of the whole thing is. >> Yeah, culture drives everything. You're right. And that was Citrix's CIO who gave those four Cs, I think, Meerah Rajavel. >> Yeah, yeah. >> She gave those four Cs. And you couldn't be, you couldn't have tapped into something that I think is the soft underbelly of the organization, which is what is the culture. And anyone who's worked in an organization with a sick culture knows that it's just, it's cancerous, right? It grows and it causes decay. And I don't care how much innovation you have. If the culture is sick, you just, you're going to lose your best people. It's hard to work in a sick culture. And so I think what we had to do is when we all started working remotely, that was a culture shift, because we were siloed off of it. We weren't actually hanging out in physical space. Some of the things that we enjoyed about meeting with other human beings physically changed. And so it really behooved organizations to take a look at how they were going to foster culture digitally, how they were going to create that sense of bonding between not only those within your departmental area, but cross over into other areas. And I think that creating that culture that says I don't have to be in the exact same physical space, but we can still connect. I mean, you and I are doing this. We're not in the same physical space. >> Jeff: Right. >> But I'm still going to feel like we met today. >> Jeff: Right. >> You can create that for your employees. And it also means that we learned that we don't have to be in that same physical space, right? And I thought that was a really interesting position when Hayden Brown, the CEO of Upwork, was talking at the summit and saying that even when we look at creating culture with employees who aren't necessarily, maybe it's a workforce from all over the world that you're using, a remote workforce. And when you're using things like employees, if you've got work to do and you can find a really good talent and you can grab them for what it is that you need, you're actually increasing your ability to be able to deliver on things versus having to worry about whether you have that person in house, but you still can create that culture where everyone is inclusive, where someone can be in Australia and someone's in San Francisco and someone's in the UK, and you still have to create a cohesive, inclusive culture. And it matters not anymore whether or not you are a full-time employee or if you're a contract worker. I think in today's space, and certainly in those future of work conversations, it's more about, to the very first thing you said at the beginning, it's more about output. How's that for tying it back up again? >> Jeff: Yeah, very good. >> And that was totally unplanned. But it is about output, and that's going to be the future of work culture. It's not going to be the title that you have, whether or not you're a full-time employee or a part-time employee or a contract worker. It's going to be who are you meeting with? Who are you having these digital interfaces with and Slacking with or using any sort of platform application that you want to use. It's remaining in touch and in communication, and no longer is it about a physical space. It's a digital space. >> Right, right. All right, well, I'm going to give you the last word. You are a super positive person, and there's reasons, and for people that haven't watched your TED Talk, they should. I think it's super impactful and it really changed the way I look at you. So of all the negatives, wrap us up with some positives that you see as we come out of COVID that going through this experience will make in our lives, both our work lives as well as our personal lives. >> Well, since you're going to allow me to go deep here, I would say one of the things that COVID has brought us is pause. It caused us to go in. And with any dark night of the soul, we have to wrestle with the things that are real for us, and the things that fall away are those that were false, false perceptions, false ideas, illusions of even thinking who we are, what we're doing. And we had to come home to ourselves. And I think one of the things that COVID gave us through uncertainty was finding a center in that uncertainty. And maybe we got to know our beloveds a bit more. Maybe we got to know our kids a bit more, even if they drive us crazy sometimes. But in the end, I think maybe we all got to know ourselves a little bit more. And for that, I think we can harness those seeds of wisdom and make better choices in the future to co-create together a future that we are all pleased to wake up in, one that is fair, one that is equal, one that is inclusive, and one that we can be proud to have contributed to. And that's what I hope we've taken from this extremely hard time. >> Well, Tamara, thanks for sharing your wisdom with us. Really appreciate it. And great to see ya. >> Good to see you, too, thank you. >> All right, she's Tamara, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (bright music)