Future of Work Marathon Series — Day 3 Company Transformation Stories

Customer Transformation Stories: Broadcom, NVIDIA, Under Armour, Jimmy Kimmel Live

Today’s future of work session was truly insightful. We heard from leaders of four major organizations on how they’ve made the transition to remote work. What’s interesting about this group is that each company had already been in the process of transforming their workstyles, workspaces, and workflows for better collaboration and engagement before the economic struggles we are seeing today, and now those efforts have prepared them to pivot their workforce to remote work and carry on with business.

Successful Global Shift to Remote Work

Our first guest was with Broadcom’s Stanley Toh (Head, Enterprise End-User Experience & Services) who explained how Broadcom transformed their workplace across 59 countries to enable employees to be more productive and collaborate globally. He shared the criteria they used for transformation, the factors for success, the benefits, and lessons learned. He also emphasized how their move to the cloud set them up for a successful global shift to remote work and an increase of 86% in Webex meetings.

What I found impressive was when we all moved to remote work, because of Broadcom’s move to the cloud they didn’t have to do anything special; there was no impact. In fact, Stanley told me, “By selecting the perfect partner, collaboration was able to scale without Broadcom having to do anything. If my solution was still on-premises, I would have ports problems, circuits problems, and bandwidth problems. Because it was in the cloud everything was able to scale.”

Enabling Workers to Work From a Space That Suits Their Workstyle

John O’Brien (Vice President, Real Estate & Site Services) shared how, when NVIDIA was undergoing workplace transformation, they looked for a design that aligned with company values. The result was a combination of smartly designed flexible workspaces and Webex collaboration tools that allow them to communicate effectively across campuses, times zones, and countries.

Because collaboration tools were already intrinsic in their work style, the shift to remote work was rather smooth. As John said, “We were able to pivot, as a company, almost seamlessly. Before we had these tools, we wouldn’t know what to do . . . I couldn’t imagine working in this new shelter in place environment with our old tools.” And, when the time comes to return to work, they are set up to allow more flexibility, “We’ve learned we can do more, effectively, without having to sit in the same room.”

Rapid Shift to Remote Work

Under Armour stands for innovation, but with rapid growth, they found they lagged in keeping employees connected. To meet this challenge, Karen Dean (Head of Collaboration Technology) went through how they created a global collaboration initiative that saw Webex meetings increase 39% year over year, while actual meeting times were reduced saving 121,000 hours.

The last piece of their initiative featured a roll-out for Webex Teams on March 2, 2020. With March 12^th as their last day in the office, they made the rapid shift not only to remote work but to planning virtual events, without missing a beat. Of special note, Karen shared this response she received from IT leadership about using Webex in these times, “My team had to implement an SAP upgrade in Latin America and had no idea how to do it. But through Webex it was flawless . . . we were able to communicate and work as a team.”

Accelerating Creativity While Maintaining Real-Time Collaboration

Lastly, we found out how Jimmy Kimmel Live, having been Webex users for years, made the transition from a live show to being produced with the majority of staff working from home and using Webex to connect to the guests. Supervising Producer Tony Romero described how when they were suddenly confronted with this disruptive situation, they were able to pivot quickly, take the gear they had and continue to produce the show.

While the current situation accelerated a more creative application of the tools and allowed the team to maintain real-time communication, the obstacles have been minimal. Before we parted, Tony had this praise for his team’s shift to remote work, “Everybody’s doing a great job. It’s been great to watch everybody rise to it and be able to take a crazy, disruptive environment . . . they’ve done better work than I’ve ever seen them do on the show, in a weird way.”