ServiceNow CIO Looks to Retain Lockdown Lessons in Hybrid Work Plans
May 07 2021 - 5:36PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
The new hybrid way of working in the wake of the coronavirus
pandemic, with some employees at home and some at the office, will
force technology leaders to think more strategically about
workplace culture, said Chris Bedi, chief information officer at
ServiceNow Inc.
Remote work "leveled the playing field....Everyone was a little
box on a video screen," said Mr. Bedi, who oversees IT for the
software company's approximately 14,000 employees across about 80
locations world-wide. But hybrid work runs the risk of creating a
new digital divide between those in the office and those still
working from home, he said.
Mr. Bedi is among many IT executives developing technologies and
business processes to help usher the new combination of in-office
and remote work. The pressure is on for IT leaders to develop
easy-to-use technology to ensure that employees feel safe, such as
through daily health checks before entering an office, and to feel
included, after much of the workforce saw each other only on video,
Mr. Bedi said.
Companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Microsoft Corp. and
Salesforce.com Inc. have recently adopted hybrid-work policies,
with employees able to work remotely for part of the week. Google
will allow a fifth of its staff to work from home permanently and
another fifth to shift to a different geographic location. Google
employees who aren't working from home daily will move to a hybrid
workweek, with about three days at the office. Other companies,
such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., expect their employees to come
back to the office full time after the pandemic.
Mr. Bedi went back to ServiceNow's Santa Clara, Calif.,
headquarters last month, his first trip to the office since the
pandemic forced its staff to work remotely over a year ago.
"It sort of felt like the first day back at school after summer
break. You don't know who you're going to run into," he said. The
company's employees are able to return to its San Francisco Bay
Area offices at 25% capacity and employees world-wide have the
choice to stay home through at least Sept. 7.
Some tasks were completed much faster at the office than they
would have been remotely, thanks to spontaneous collisions in the
hallway, Mr. Bedi said. For example, he ran into the company's
chief financial officer, Gina Mastantuono, and, in a few seconds,
got her opinion on a customer-related issue. "That probably would
have gotten lost in the tyranny of the urgent," he said.
The headquarters now has more collaborative spaces for teamwork,
brainstorming and group meetings, which will be one of the main
uses for the workplace going forward, he said. "Sitting there to
bang out some code probably isn't the best use of coming to the
office. That part has definitely changed," Mr. Bedi said.
Certain cultural changes brought on by the pandemic need to be
kept in the new hybrid mode, he said. For example, he is making a
conscious effort to make sure everyone has an equal voice in
meetings, whether they are in the office or not.
He is helping develop a data analytics app that will match new
hires based on special interests they shared on their public
LinkedIn profiles, as part of the new-hire onboarding process. The
optional service is aimed at helping create connections between
employees. The company hired about 5,000 employees globally since
remote work began in mid-March 2020.
Technology is playing a critical role in the new hybrid work
environment, and it must be as easy to use and intuitive, he
said.
Mr. Bedi said his IT teams and the company's product-development
teams spent the past year writing and testing several Safe
Workplace apps in part to help companies verify that they meet
workplace health requirements. ServiceNow has been selling the apps
to clients for about a year and they are being used by more than
1,000 companies.
Similar apps are being developed by other IT leaders of software
companies. Jo-ann Olsovsky, who leads Salesforce.com's internal IT
department, has helped develop apps that enable employers to
stagger work shifts and provide staff with daily health checks
before entering a building, among other measures.
Cynthia Stoddard, senior vice president and CIO at
software-maker Adobe Inc., has overseen the development of an app
called Adobe Life. The app allows in-person and remote employees to
access various health and wellness tools as well as book meeting
space, order food from the office cafe, and make appointments with
IT staff.
"There have been such tremendous ideas that have come into the
organization from people who didn't speak up in the past. What
we're trying to do as we move into hybrid is make sure we don't
lose that," Ms. Stoddard said.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 07, 2021 17:21 ET (21:21 GMT)
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