It’s been a little over two weeks since Citrix went fully remote across its global offices as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and what appeared to be a short-lived situation has quickly turned into a new way of doing business, maintaining operations, teaching students, and responding to the needs of citizens around the world. While this particular brand of working from home is rife with additional challenges, including homeschooling and remaining socially distant, the technical aspects of how we’re all coping and remaining productive have been fascinating to me as an IT and business leader.
Global IT teams around the world have been charged with making this shift to remote work a seamless transition, with technologies set up in data centers and in the cloud to achieve near constant uptime and unlimited scaling to maintain business continuity. The focus of technology leaders is shifting from simply maintaining business continuity to scaling workforce efficiency coupled with a great remote work experience.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, remote work isn’t always easy and is a new workstyle for many, which requires attention to people and their well being, processes and technologies with a keen eye for organization change management (i.e., a cultural shift). At Citrix, we are learning a lot more about our workforce, their workflow, and the way they leverage technology to achieve business outcomes — not to mention what their pets look like, what their kids are doing to keep themselves busy, and what some of their makeshift home offices look like.
A Data-Driven Approach
As we switch our gears to efficiency, we must look at tracking metrics across three vectors — people, process, and technology — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Surveying employees to ask if someone feels more productive is just as important as the hard data on their technology used. We must approach workforce productivity with three categories in mind:
- System Metrics: What the technology says
- Usage of virtual desktops infrastructure increased by 53 percent.
- Collaboration sessions using Citrix ShareFile increased by 29 percent and total users by 39 percent.
- Business Metrics: What the output says
- With the entire company moving to remote work, we experienced a 20 percent increase in ticket volume to the IT service desk that serves Citrix employees. And while reviewing the productivity of the team, we saw that SLA compliance rose to 93 percent and the average issue resolution time went down by 36 percent, while keeping Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) steady.
- Customer demand for technical support has increased 26 percent, with Citrix being their business continuity solution. We are able to keep the velocity of issue closure and the enterprise customer NPS at the same level.
- During this period, back-office operations such as sales, order processing, and finance have increased their transaction processing velocity by 25 percent.
- Culture: How our people feel
- Our quick pulse survey results showed 66 percent of the employee population feels more productive working remote, while 31 percent feel about the same productivity level, and only 3 percent said they are more productive in the office. The greatest attribution on efficiency was reduction or absence of commute time, which showed up in their ability to contribute more time to work and to family.
- With the travel restrictions in place, teams were able to access leadership more directly and found it less challenging to get leaders in meetings for swift decision making.
Macro-Patterns
In addition, we observed the following macro-patterns with a remote work culture:
- A shift from people-centric to process-centric culture. To be effective when working across remote global teams, people need to adapt their meeting and engagement approach for a digital world, using shorter but more frequent and targeted online meetings, and we see this pattern picking up momentum.
- We also noticed a higher percentage of meetings starting on time and ending on time.
- As we are social beings and crave human connection to continue our trust building, we have seen teams turn on their cameras and interact over virtual coffee chats, happy hours, lunches, yoga sessions, and even mindfulness sessions for breathing and meditation, as well as a host of mental health and home schooling exercises.
Our global shift to remote work to curb the outbreak of COVID-19 could well change the tides on the future of remote work, even with this smaller sample dataset. Employees who may not have considered working from home now see this as a viable alternative to being in the office five days a week. On the flipside, working remote isn’t for everyone, and the lack of human interaction may affect an employee’s emotional state. We definitely need to find balance and transparency for this to work.
The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly tested us as professionals, parents, caregivers and as humans, but as with all crises, this one will eventually end. While our main priority is everyone’s safety, it’s imperative that we find lessons where they come, and I believe this is a defining moment that could alter how we may all work long into the future.
