The last six months have been a wild ride. None of us could have imagined at the beginning of 2020 how entirely our world would shift and how much we would be required to adapt and overcome to a very dynamic situation. There have been, obviously, challenging moments. Yet, if I pause to reframe our obstacles into opportunities, I can see a lot of goodness resulting from difficulty.
As the leader of a 400-person organization, my priority has always been the health and safety of our team. Our people are our most important resource. Many of them are struggling to balance homeschooling their kids and/or managing elderly parents while still excelling at their jobs. Interestingly, I feel tighter and more aligned to our team now than ever before. We’ve implemented a few strategies both on my team and across Intel to ensure that our employees continue to feel connected even while we are apart:
- Increased communications (monthly all hands, monthly leadership council, more 1:1s).
- More listening; People want to be heard.
- Provided additional resources, such as childcare reimbursement, flexible schedules, reduced workload, job-share and providing up to a year-long Leave of Absence if needed.
- I did an entire all hands a couple of months ago focused on “fighting the funk.” It helped my staff and me to walk through things that give us energy, like seeing the team win a hard-fought design, hearing the creative ways our employees are working with customers, starting on a challenging project and more. People want to know their leaders are human and struggling too, but we need to give them concrete actions to take in order to stay engaged with work and keep motivated.
I’m incredibly proud of our team’s ability to evolve and continue to meet the needs of our customers despite the difficult environment. It’s also been powerful to see the ways in which the technology we develop is enriching the lives of so many people.
Even before COVID-19, the IT industry was already in a period of rapid change. Now, that change has been accelerated. As organizations continue to become more resilient, there’s no doubt that solutions that require on-prem support can pose a challenge in the COVID era. In addition, many enterprises are reviewing their business continuity plans for added resilience.
One observation I’ve made is that enterprises will continue to invest in remote-first technology. There’s also been increased dependence on edge to cloud solutions to support employees with everything from video calls to Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) use cases that will replace some on-premise work. Edge and Internet of Things (IoT) is a fast-growing business at Intel. I have no doubt that organizations who optimize their strategy around remote working conditions will be better prepared for the future.
The demand for compute and storage is not slowing down. Yes, COVID-19 has created some hardships, but there’s also tremendous opportunity for innovation in both our business and our culture. For our part, we are laser focused on building a strong internal culture so that we’re able to effectively serve our customers no matter what lies ahead.