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Work in a COVID-19 World: Back to
the Office Won’t Mean Back to
Normal
Transcript of a discussion on charting a course through unprecedented complexity to deliver the
office of the future.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and
you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.
Businesses around the globe now face uncharted waters when it comes to planning the
new normal for where and how their employees return to work. The complex maze of
risk factors, precautions, constantly changing pandemic impacts -- and the need for
boosting employee satisfaction and productivity -- are proving a daunting challenge.
Stay with us here as we explore how companies can make better decisions and develop
adept policies on where and how to work for safety, peace of mind, and economic
recovery.
Here to share their recent findings and chart new ways to
think about working through a pandemic are Donna
Kimmel, Executive Vice President and Chief People
Officer at Citrix. Welcome, Donna.
Donna Kimmel: Hi, there, Dana. Thanks for having me.
Gardner: We’re also here with Tony Gomes, Executive
Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Citrix.
Welcome, Tony.
Tony Gomes: Hey, Dana, great to be with you.
Gardner: Donna, these are some of the most difficult
decisions businesses and workers have faced when it comes to physically going to work.
Workers are not only concerned for themselves; they are worried about the impacts on
their families and communities. Businesses, of course, are facing unprecedented change
in how they manage their people and processes.
So even though there are few precedents -- and we’re really only in the first few months
of the COVID-19 pandemic -- how has Citrix begun to develop guidelines for you and
your customers for an acceptable return to work.
Kimmel

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Move forward with values, collaboration
Kimmel: It really starts with a foundation that’s incredibly important to Tony, me, and
our leadership team. It starts with our values and culture. Who are we? How do we
operate? What’s important to us? Because that enables us to frame the responses to
everything we do. As you indicated, this is a daunting task -- and it’s a humbling task.
When we focus on our culture and our values -- putting our people, their health, and their
safety first -- that enables us to focus on business continuity and ultimately our
customers and communities. Without that focus on values we wouldn’t be able to make
as easily the decisions we’re making. We also realized as a part of this that there are no
easy answers and no one-size-fits-all solutions.
We recognized that creating a framework that we utilize around the world has to be
adopted based on the various sites, locations, and business needs across our
organization. And, as we’ve acknowledged in the past, we also realized that this really
means, it “takes a village.”
The number of employees partnering
with us across multiple disciplines in
the organization is tremendous. We
have partnership not only from legal
and human resources (HR), but also
our finance organization, IT, real estate
and facilities, our global risk team,
procurement, communications, our
travel organization, and all of our
functional leaders and site leaders. It’s a tremendous effort to put this together, to create
what we believe is the right thing to do -- in terms of managing the health and safety of
our employees -- as we bring them back into the workforce.
Gomes: Yes, we’ve tapped the entire Citrix global
organization for talent. And we have found two things.
One, when it comes to going through this, be open to
innovation and answers from all parts of the organization.
For example, our sites in the Asia-Pacific region that
have been dealing the longest with COVID-19 and are in
the process of returning to the office, they have been
innovative. They are teaching the rest of our site leaders
the best ways to go about reopening their sites. So even
as the corporate leaders are here in the US, we’re
learning an awful lot from our colleagues on the ground
in the Asia-Pacific region.Gomes
We have partnership not only from
legal and human resources (HR), but
also our finance organization, IT, real
estate and facilities, our global risk
team, procurement, communications,
our travel organization, and all of our
functional leaders and site leaders.

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Two, be aware that this process is going to call upon you to have skills on your team that
you may not have had on your team before. So that means experts on business
continuity, for example, but also medical experts.
One of the decisions Donna and I made early on is that we needed to bring medical
expertise to our team. Donna, through her relationships and her team, along with a top-
notch benefits consultant, found great medical resources and expertise for us to rely on.
That’s an example of calling upon new talents, and it’s causing us to look for innovation
in every corner of the organization.
Gardner: Citrix has conducted some recent studies that help us understand where the
employees are coming from. Tell us about the state of their thinking right now.
Get comfortable to get back to work
Kimmel: Citrix did a study with one poll of about 2,000 US workers. We found that at
least 67 percent of the respondents did not feel comfortable returning to the office for at
least one month.
And in examining the sentiment of what it would take for them to feel comfortable coming
back into the office, some 51 percent indicated that there has to be testing and
screening. Another 46 percent prefer to wait until a [novel coronavirus] vaccine is ready.
And 82 percent were looking for some kind of contact-tracing to make sure that we could
at least connect with other individuals if there was an issue.
This was an external study, but as we talk with our own employees -- our own surveys of
roundtable discussions, group dialogues, and feedback we get from our managers -- we
are finding similar results. Many of our employees, though they would like to be able to
come back to the office, recognize that coming back immediately, post-COVID-19, is not
going to be to the same office that they left. We recognize that we need to make sure
we’re creating a safe environment, one conducive for them to be productive in the office.
Ready They’re Not – Survey Reveals
Employees Reluctant to Return to Office
Gardner: Tony, what jumped out to you as interesting and telling in these recent
findings?
Gomes: Donna hit on it, which is how aligned the results of this external study are
coming in with our own experiences; what we’re listening for and hearing from our global
workforce and what our own internal surveys are telling us.
We’ve been taking that feedback and building that into the way we’re approaching the
reopening decision-making process.

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For example, we know that employees are concerned about whether the cities, states,
and countries they live and work in have adequate testing. Is there adequate contact-
tracing? Are the medical facilities capable of supporting COVID-19 patients in a non-
crisis mode?
So we built all of that into our decision-making. Every time we analyze whether an office
or campus is ready for a phased reopening approach, we first look for those factors,
along with governmental lifting and governmental lockdown orders.
We’re trying to be clear, communicating with employees that, “Hey, we are looking at all
of this.” In that way it becomes a feedback loop. We hear the concern. We build the
concern into our processes. We communicate back to the employees that our decisions
are being made on the basis of what they express to us and are concerned about.
But it’s really amazing to see the alignment of the external study and what we’re hearing
internally.
Kimmel: What Tony is acknowledging is right-
on about understanding the concerns of our
employees. They want to have a sense of
confidence that the setup of the office will be
appropriate for them.
We’re also trying to provide choice to our employees. Even as we’ll be looking at the
critical roles that need to come back, we want to make sure that employees have the
opportunity to self-select in terms of understanding what it will be like to work in the
office in that environment.
We also know that employees have specific concerns: Maybe they have their own health
concerns, or family members that live with them have health issues where they would be
at greater risk, or they’re not back to normal societal functioning so at-home caregiving is
still an issue. Parents just came through homeschooling, but they still may need to
provide summer day camps or provide other support for elder care.
We also recognize that some people are just nervous and don’t feel comfortable. So
we’re trying to put our employees’ minds at ease by providing them a good look at what
it will be like -- and feel like -- to come back to the office. They should know the safety
and security that we’re putting into place on their behalf, but still also providing them with
a feeling of comfort to make a decision on what they think is right based on their own
circumstances.
Gardner: It strikes me that organizations, while planning, need to also stay agile, to be
flexible, and perhaps recognize that being able to react is more important than coming
up with the final answer quickly. Is that your understanding as well, that organizations
need to come up with new ways of being able to adapt rapidly and do whatever the
changing circumstances require?
Employees want to have a
sense of confidence that the
setup of the office will be
appropriate for them.

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Cross-train your functionality, remain flexible
Gomes: Absolutely, Dana. What Donna and I have tried to do is build a strong cross-
functional team that has a lot of capacity across all of the functional areas. Then we try
to create decision-making frameworks from the top down.
We then set some basic planning assumptions, or answer some of the big questions,
especially in terms of the level of care that we’re going to provide to each employee
across the globe. Those include areas such as social distancing, personal protective
equipment (PPE), things like that, that we’re going to make sure that every employee
has across the globe.
Back to Office Won’t Mean Back to Normal
Poll Shows Workers Demand Strict Precautions
But then it’s a different decision based on how that gets implemented at each and every
site, when, where, and who leads. Who has a bigger or smaller team, and how do they
influence or control the process? How much support from corporate headquarters versus
local initiatives are taken?
Those are very different from site-to-site,
along with the conditions they are
responding to. The public health
conditions are dynamic and different in
every location -- and they are constantly
changing. And that’s where you need to
give your teams the ability to respond
and foster that active-response capacity.
Kimmel: We’ve worked really hard to make sure that we’re making faster, timely
decisions, but we also recognize that we may not have all the information. We’ve done a
lot of digging, a lot of research, and have great information. We’re very transparent with
our employees in terms of where we are, what information we have at the time that we’re
making the decisions, and we recognize that because it’s moving so quickly we may
have to adapt those decisions.
As Tony indicated, that can be based on a site, a region, a country, or medical
circumstances and new medical information. So, again, it goes back to our ability to live
our values and what’s important to us. That includes transparency of decisions, of
bringing employees along on the journey so that they understand how and why we’ve
arrived at those decisions. And then when we need to shift them, they will understand
why we’ve made a shift.
The public health conditions are
dynamic and different in every location
– and they are constantly changing.
And that’s where you need to give
your teams the ability to respond and
foster that active-response capacity.

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One of the positive byproducts or outcomes of this situation is being able to pivot to
make good and fast decisions and being transparent about where and why we need to
make them so that we can continue to pivot if necessary.
Gardner: Of course, some of those big decisions initially meant having more people
than ever working remotely and from their homes. A lot of business executives weren’t
always on board with that. Now that we’ve gone through it, what have we learned?
Are people able to get their work done? They seem to be cautious about wanting to
come back without the proper precautions in place. But even if we continue to work
remotely, the work seems to be getting done.
Donna, what’s your impression about letting people continue to work at home? Has that
been okay at Citrix?
Work from home, at the office, or a hybrid
Kimmel: Tony and I and the rest of the leadership team certainly recognized as we
were all thrust into this that we would be 100 percent work-from-home (WFH). We all
realized and learned very quickly that there were very few, if any, roles that were so
critical that they had to be done in the office.
Because remote work is part of the Citrix brand, we were able to enable employees to
work securely and access their information from anywhere, anytime. We recognized, all
of a sudden, that we were capable of doing that in more areas than we had recognized.
We’re now able to say, “Okay, what might be the new normal beyond this?” We
recognize that there will be re-integration back into our worksites done in the current
COVID-19 environment.
But beyond COVID, post-vaccines, as
we think about our business continuity
going forward, I do think that we will
be moving into, very purposefully, a
more hybrid work arrangement. That
means new, innovative, in-office opportunities because we still want people to be
working face-to-face and have those in-person sort of collisions, as we call them. Those
you can’t do at all or they are harder to do on videoconferencing.
But there can be a new balance between in-office and remote work -- and fine-tuning our
own practices – that will enable us to be as effective as possible in both environments.
So, no doubt, we have already started to undertake that as a post-COVID approach. We
are asking what it will look like for us, and then how do we then make sure from a
philosophical and a strategy perspective that the right practices are put into place to
enable it.
Beyond COVID, post-vaccines, … we
will be moving into, very purposefully,
a more hybrid work arrangement.

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This has been a big, forced experiment. We looked at it and said, “Wow, we did it. We’ve
done really well. We’ve been very fortunate.”
Home is where the productivity is
Gomes: Donna’s team has designed some great surveys with great participation
across the global workforce. It’s revealed that a very high percentage of our employees
feel as productive -- if not even more productive -- working from home rather than
working from the office.
And the thing is, when you peel back the onion and you look at specific teams and
specific locations, and what they can accomplish through this, it’s just really amazing.
For example, Donna and I, earlier this morning, were on a videoconference with our site
leadership team in Bangalore, India where we have our second-largest office, which has
quite a few functions. That campus represents all of the Citrix functions, spread across a
number of buildings. We were looking at detailed information about the productivity of
our product engineering teams over their last agile planning interval, their continuous
integration interval, and how they are planning for their next interval.
We looked at information coming from our order processing team in Bangalore and also
from our support team. And what we saw is increased productivity across those teams.
We’re looking at not just anecdotal information, but objective data showing that more co-
checks occurred, fewer bugs, and more on-time delivery of new functionality occurred
within the interval that we had just completed.
We are just tremendously proud of what our teams are accomplishing during this time of
global, personal, family, and societal stress. But there is something more here. Donna
has put her finger on it, which is there is a way to drive increased productivity by creating
these environments where more people can work from home.
Help All Employees Feel Safe
It Matters More Than Ever
There are challenges, and Donna’s team is especially focused on the challenges of
remote management. How do you replace the casual interactions that can lead to
innovation and creative thinking? How do you deal with team members or teams that
rely on more in-person interaction for their team dynamic?
So there are challenges we need to address. But we have also uncovered something I
think here that’s pretty powerful -- and we are seeing it, not just anecdotally, but through
actual data.

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Gardner: As we query more companies about their productivity over the past few
months, we will probably see more instances where working at home has actually been
a benefit.
I know from the employee perspective that many people feel that they save money and
time by not commuting. They are not paying for transportation. They have more of a
work balance with their lives. They have more control, in a sense, over their lives.
The technology has been there for some time, Donna, to allow this. It was really a
cultural hurdle we had to overcome that the pandemic has endowed us with. Not that a
pandemic is a good thing, but the results allow us to test models that now show how
technology and processes can allow for higher productivity when working from home.
Will what you are experiencing at Citrix follow through to other companies?
Ready They’re Not – Survey Reveals
Employees Reluctant to Return to Office
Kimmel: Oh, yes, definitely. I have been on a number of calls with my peers at other
companies. Everyone is talking about what’s next and how they design this into their
organizations.
We recognize all of the benefits, Dana, that you just indicated. We recognize that those
benefits are things that we want to be able to capture. New employees coming into the
workforce, the Gen Zs and the Millennials, are looking for flexibility to be able to balance
that work and life and integrate it in a more productive way for themselves. Part of that is
a bit of a push in terms of what we are hearing from employees.
It also enables us to tap into new talent pools. Folks that may not live near a particular
office but have tremendous skills that they can offer. There are those who may have
varying disabilities who may not be able to commute or don’t live near offices. There are
a number of ways for us to tap into more workers that have the skills that we are looking
for who don’t actually live in near offices. So again, all of that I think is quite helpful to us.
Legal lessons for employees, employers
Gardner: Tony, what are some of the legal implications if we have a voluntary return to
work? What does that mean for companies? Are there issues about not being able to
force people, or not being able to fire them, or flexibly manage them?
Gomes: One of things that we have seen,
Dana, during this pandemic, is significant
changes in employee relations laws
around the globe. This is not just in the
United States, but everywhere.
We have seen, during this pandemic,
significant changes in employee
relations laws around the globe.

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Governments are trying to both protect employees, preserve jobs, and provide guidance
to employers to clarify how existing legal requirements apply in this pandemic.
For example, here in the United States both the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
have put out guidelines that address things such as PPE. What criteria do employers
need to meet when they are providing PPE to employees? How do you work within the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements when offering employees the ability
to come back to the office? How do you permit them to opt out without calling them out,
without highlighting that they may have an underlying medical condition that you as an
employer are obligated to maintain as confidential and allow the employee to keep
confidential?
Another big area that impacts the employer-
employee relationship, that is changing in
this environment, is privacy laws – especially
laws and regulatory requirements that
impact the way that employers request,
manage, and store personal health
information about employees.
Just recently a new bill was introduced in the US Congress to try and address these
issues and provide employees greater protection, and provide employers more certainty,
especially in areas such as the digital processing and storage of personal health
information through things such as contact-tracing apps.
Back to Office Won’t Mean Back to Normal
Poll Shows Workers Demand Strict Precautions
Gardner: Donna, we have only been at this for a few months, adjusting to this new
world, this new normal. What have we learned about what works and what doesn’t
work?
Is there anything that jumps out to you that says this is a definite thing you want to do –
or something you should probably avoid -- when it comes to managing the work-balance
new normal?
Place your trust in the new normal
Kimmel: One, we learned that this can be done. That shifts the mental models that
some had come into, that for any employment engagement you would prefer to have
face-to-face-only interactions. And so this taught us something.
It also helped us build trust in each other, and trust in leadership, because we continue
to make decisions based on our values. We have been very transparent with employees,
Another big area that impacts the
employer-employee relationship,
that is changing in this
environment, is privacy laws.

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with phenomenal amounts of communication we put out there -- two-way, with high
empathy, and building better relationships. That also means better collaboration and
relationship-building, not only between team members, but between managers and
employees. It has been a really strong outcome.
And again, that’s part of the empathy, the opportunity for empathy, as you learn more
about each other’s families. You are meeting them as they run by on the video. You are
hearing about the struggles that people face. And so managers, employees, and team
members are working with each other to help mitigate those as much as possible.
Those are some big aspects of what we have learned. And, as I mentioned earlier, we
have benefitted from our ability to make decisions faster, acknowledging various risks,
and using the detailed information such as what Tony’s team brings to the table to help
us make good decisions at any given time. Those are some of the benefits and positive
outcomes we have seen.
The challenges are when we go into the post-COVID-19 phase, we recognize that
children may be back to school. Caregiving resources may be in place, so we may not
be dealing with as many of those challenges. But we recognize there is sometimes still
isolation and loneliness that can arise from working remotely.
People are human. We are creatures who
want to be near each other and with each
other. So we still need to find that balance to
make sure everyone feels like they are
included, involved, and contributing to the
success of the organization. We must increase and improve our managers’ ability to lead
productively in this environment. I think that is also really important.
And we must look for ways to drive collaboration, not only when people come back into
the office -- because we know how to do that well -- but how do we have the right
technology tools to enable us to collaborate well while we are away – from white-
boarding techniques and things that enable us to collaborate even more from a WFH
and remote perspective.
So it will be about the fine-tuning of enabling success, stronger success, more impactful
success in that environment.
Gardner: Tony, what do you see as things that are working and maybe some things that
are not that people should be thinking about?
Level-up by listening to what people need
Gomes: One of the things that’s really working is a high level of productivity that we are
seeing -- unexpectedly high – even though about 98 percent of our company has been
working from home for eight weeks-plus. So that’s one.
People are human. We are
creatures who want to be near
each other and with each other.

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The other thing that is really working is our
approach to investing in our employees
and listening to our employees. I mean this
very tangibly, whether it’s the stipend that
we provide our employees to go out and
buy the equipment that they need to more
comfortably and more productively work
from home or to support charities and
organizations or small businesses. This is
truly tangibly investing in employees, truly tangibly, in integrated, multichannel ways,
listening to the feedback from employees and processing that, putting that into your
processes and feeding it back to them. That’s really worked.
And again, the proof is in the high-level productivity and the very high level of
satisfaction despite the very challenging environment. Donna mentioned some of them.
One of the bigger challenges that we see right now is obviously the challenge of
employees who have families, who have childcare, and other family care responsibilities
in the middle of this pandemic while trying to work and many times being even more
productive than they ever have been for us when working in the office.
So again, it’s nice to say we invest in our employees and we expect our employees to
reciprocate, but we are actually seeing this in action. We have made very tangible
investments and we see it coming back to us.
Mind and body together win the long race
On the other hand, we have to be really careful about a couple of things. One, this is a
long-term game, an ultramarathon, where we are only in the first quarter, if you will. It
feels like we should be down at the two-minute warning, but we are really in the first
quarter of this game. We have a long way to go before we get to viable therapeutics and
viable, widely available effective vaccines that will allow us to truly come back to the
work and social life we had before this crisis. So we have got to be prepared mentally to
run this ultramarathon, and we have to help and coach our teams to have that mindset.
As Donna alluded to, this is also going to be a challenge in mental health. This is going
to be very difficult because of its length, severity, and multifaceted impact -- not just on
employees but across society. So being supportive and empathetic to the mental health
challenges many of us are going to face is going to be very important.
View this as a long-term challenge and pay attention to the mental health of your
employees and teams as much as you are paying attention to their physical health.
Kimmel: It’s been incredibly important for us to focus on mental health for our
employees. We have tried to pull together as many resources as possible, not only for
This is truly tangibly investing in
employees, truly tangibly, in
integrated, multichannel ways,
listening to the feedback from
employees and processing that,
putting that into your processes
and feeding it back to them.

12. Page 12 of 13
our employees but for our managers who tend to be in the squeeze point, because they
themselves may be experiencing some of these same issues and pressures.
Help All Employees Feel Safe
It Matters More Than Ever
And then they also carry that caring sense of responsibility for their employees, which
adds to the pressure. So, for us, paying attention to that and making sure we have the
right resources is really important to our strategy. I can’t agree more, this is absolutely a
marathon, not a sprint.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on how businesses around the globe are planning for the new
normal for where and how their employees work. And we have learned how companies
can make better decisions and develop adept policies on where and how to work safely
with peace of mind and with economic recovery throughout this pandemic.
So a big thank you to our guests, Donna Kimmel, Executive Vice President and Chief
People Officer at Citrix. Thank you so much, Donna.
Kimmel: Thank you, Dana. It’s great to be here.
Gardner: And we have also been with Tony Gomes, Executive Vice President and Chief
Legal Officer at Citrix. Thank you, Tony.
Gomes: Thank you, Dana. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect
business continuity innovation discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at
Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Citrix-sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your business community and do
come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Citrix.
Transcript of a discussion on making better decisions and creating adept policies that usher in an
acceptable future of work and economic recovery. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-
2020. All rights reserved.
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