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4 min read . Updated: 24 Dec 2021, 02:34 PM IST Chief information officers, who helped enable the shift to remote work in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, are now working to revamp office space and processes to make the workplace more inclusive for the long haul.
Hybrid and remote work became more firmly entrenched in 2021 as the Delta and Omicron variants delayed plans for a broad return to the office, prompting executives to take steps to make sure the system is working for everyone.
“That integration of the physical world and the virtual world has probably been the most complicated," said Yael Cosset, CIO of Kroger Co., describing his efforts to create the hybrid office.
Part of the problem, he said, is ensuring a “level playing field" for those who are in the office and those who are at home. Cincinnati-based Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain by revenue, has installed camera and audio hardware in its conference rooms, although for larger conference rooms, it’s still difficult to find the right audio-balancing technology that picks up speaker’s voices but not background noise, Mr. Cosset said.
Conference-room upgrades
Paul von Autenried, CIO of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., said the New York-based biopharmaceutical company is operating under a hybrid model. During meetings, employees in conference rooms generally join from their laptops and turn their cameras on so virtual participants can see everyone’s face, he said.
Additionally, he said, “We’re generally finding the practice that people are still raising their hands when they want to speak, and by doing that, it also encourages a greater degree of inclusivity…so that the remote workers are not disadvantaged in those moments of wanting to interject."
Anil Bhatt, CIO of health insurer Anthem Inc., is also working to bridge the divide between remote and on-site employees. The Indianapolis-based company has installed tablets at seats in conference rooms. The tablets’ cameras show the face of each person in the conference room, rather than one wide shot of the whole group. The benefit is that employees working remotely can still see the faces of those in the conference room, he said.
“Conference rooms and the conference-room technologies were designed with remote work as an afterthought," said Edward Wagoner, CIO, digital at Chicago-based commercial real-estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “We need to redesign them to be more inclusive," he said, adding that the reason people will be coming into offices now will be “to collaborate and socialize," not just to sit and answer emails.
Centene’s ‘fusion centers’
Beyond conference rooms, some CIOs are also looking to optimize whole offices.
Healthcare company Centene Corp. is building an East Coast campus in Charlotte, N.C., to complement its St. Louis headquarters and its West Coast campus in Sacramento, Calif. The first phase of construction is expected to be completed in 2022, good timing for the company to optimize hybrid work in the campus’s design, said CIO Mark Brooks.
The new campus will have “fusion centers" designed for collaboration, Mr. Brooks said. One room will have a video wall in the middle that can serve as a partition if teams need to work independently, or it can be used to let the teams present content on both sides of the wall “to bring everybody…together to work in a collaborative way," he said.
The Charlotte campus will also include amenities such as a child-care center, a gym, a clinic and pharmacy, and electric-car charging stations.
Efficiency tips
Mr. Cosset said Kroger is leveraging data about employees’ work habits to provide them with personalized tips about how they can work more efficiently, whether from home or the office. The tips, which come in the form of a weekly email, can tell employees things like how often they are getting distracted by emails when they are in a meeting or how long they have been working without taking a break.
Employees can opt in if they want to receive such tips, he said. Apart from that, insights are shared at an “aggregated level," based on an entire team, department or office, he said: “We wanted to really make sure we were not turning into too much prescription at the individual level."
‘Focus Fridays’
“There’s definitely more fatigue because we have so much more machine time," said Mark Spykerman, CIO of AmerisourceBergen Corp. The drug wholesale and distribution company based near Philadelphia has implemented “focus Fridays," he said, when employees are encouraged to block out the hours from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. to focus on work rather than hold meetings. Mr. Spykerman said he hopes the practice will help employees avoid “Zoom fatigue."
“Focus Fridays" have also caught on at software maker Momentive Global Inc., said CIO Eric Johnson. The San Mateo, Calif., company owns SurveyMonkey, a service that lets people design and implement web-based surveys.
Momentive has been remote since the beginning of the pandemic, but plans to go hybrid in 2022. Mr. Johnson said when that happens, there will be learning to be done, not necessarily in terms of the technology but in terms of how the people work.
“The folks that are in the office versus the folks that are not in the office…and how they operate together is, I think, still something a lot of CIOs are trying to figure out," he said.
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