On this special episode of The Six Five - Insider Edition hosts Daniel Newman and Patrick Moorhead welcomed Jen Felch, Chief Digital Officer and CIO for Dell Technologies to talk about how the company is dealing with COVID-19 internally with employees and externally with customers.

 

Leverage What You Have

 

Dell has over 150,000 employees globally and preparation to be able to work from home has been key for their workforce. 90 percent of Dell employees have laptops that they can work from at home or in the office on a regular basis, but there was still a need to get the other 10 percent — about 15,000 people — into a remote work environment with the right equipment. The IT team leveraged the device stockpile that they already had and collected extra laptops from other employees around the globe and were able to move the 15,000 employees remote in about 10 days. 

 

Expand on Existing Infrastructure

 

Prior to the pandemic, Dell had already started to make changes to the internal infrastructure to make the user experience better for remote employees. They redesigned the network, found a better VPN, rolled out SDwan, and started using things like Zoom and Teams for collaboration. The pandemic or major disaster was not in Dell’s plan at all, but thanks to digital transformation efforts they were able to quickly adapt and expand. 

 

Around 60 percent of Dell employees already had some sort of flexible work from home schedule, so Dell was a little bit ahead of the curve when the pandemic started. With a VPN already in place, the IT and security teams just expanded the existing infrastructure to handle the extra remote employees. Data security is key for Dell so to be able to just expand what was already in place ensuring all mobile devices were encrypted definitely helped with business continuity.

 

The Importance of Keeping IT Infrastructure in a Healthy State

 

Any IT leader knows the struggle of explaining why infrastructure needs to be funded even if there isn’t an immediate return. But this pandemic has given IT leaders the opportunity to demonstrate that building flexibility into the system and keeping IT infrastructure healthy and up to date can make a difference. It’s critical to make investments in IT to prepare for something like this in the future.

 

Enabling Collaboration

 

As people moved to work from home full time, one of the main challenges that Dell and a lot of other companies likely faced was how to ensure that employees can still collaborate effectively. Dell had only rolled out Teams to a few parts of the staff, but took this opportunity to roll it out to everyone. Dell is also relying on leaders, at every level, to maintain and encourage engagement among employees. There needs to be tools in place for employees to work at their own pace and be productive in their new environment, while still being connected to the team so no one feels adrift.

 

Three Important Lessons

 

Dell is two weeks into this new work from home environment and Jen shared that there are lessons emerging that she is learning from this experience. If you only take away one thing from this podcast, let it be these lessons:

 

1. Stay connected to your team every day. Whether it’s a phone call or a quick chat meeting, maintaining that connection is crucial for productivity and the team’s ability to solve problems.
2. Anticipate what’s next. Think about where your weak spots are and shore those up now so you’re ready for anything. We are living in a dynamic environment where things are changing daily so we need to be prepared.
3. Stay flexible and optimistic. Things will eventually change. We are going to come out of this at some point, and it’s important to let your team know that everything will be okay. We are all learning to work in this new environment so flexibility and optimism will go a long way.

 

Want to learn more about what Dell is doing in the face of COVID-19? Listen to the full podcast here and while you’re at it be sure to subscribe to The Six Five Podcast so that you never miss an episode.