How CIOs in 2020 Rallied Their Companies Around Remote Work

Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer at Bank of America Corp., said her team delivered more than 90,000 laptops earlier this year to employees so they could work remotely. More than 85% of the company’s employees are currently working from home.

“We experienced a sea change in work location almost overnight,” said Ms. Bessant, one of 45 IT executives who responded via email to CIO Journal’s annual end-of-year questionnaire to discuss remote work and other issues. “At the same time, we were being hit with the intensity of the need for great work.”

To rally employees during the stress of this year, it has been critical for them to understand their purpose and to connect themselves and their work to the larger companywide vision, Ms. Bessant added.

The technology team at Accenture PLC oversaw a major transition to remote work that included a significant increase in audio and video calls.

“Covid-19 has fundamentally changed how we work,” said Penelope Prett, CIO at the professional services company. Her team sent more than 80,000 desktop computers to employees’ homes around the world within a week and bought more than 33,000 Wi-Fi hot spots for employees to be able to work remotely.

Accenture said its use of Microsoft Corp.’s Microsoft Teams virtual collaboration tool has increased to over 900 million minutes of audio connections and 90 million minutes of videoconferences each month, compared with 350 million minutes and 14 million minutes monthly, respectively, at the onset of the pandemic in mid-March.

As lockdown restrictions were enforced in various locations across the world, Ms. Prett’s team made individual calls to employees to make sure they were ready to transition to remote work. “Responsible leadership and leading with compassion take on a deeper meaning as our people and our clients find themselves in an unfamiliar, fast-moving global environment,” she said.

Kimberly Anstett, global chief technology officer at Iron Mountain Inc., said she has adopted a concept called “silent meetings,” after reading about the technique in a book by Bruce Daisley, an author and former vice president at Twitter Inc. During meetings, teams of the enterprise information management services company’s employees actively collaborate at the same time in a single cloud-based document, discussing and evaluating notes rather than just listening to speakers and viewing slides.

“Silent meetings get all attendees to participate and share their ideas instead of having one voice dominate the conversation,” Ms. Anstett said. The meetings are far more productive and engaging than many in-person meetings before the pandemic, she added.

Tim Langley-Hawthorne, CIO at Hitachi Vantara, said he is testing Miro, a tool that allows teams to collaborate online using virtual whiteboards. The goal is to help re-create the brainstorming process that teams at the Hitachi Ltd. subsidiary and provider of digital infrastructure, data and risk management and other technology services had when they worked physically together using whiteboards, sticky-notes and markers.

Many information technology executives, including ones at Automatic Data Processing Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Ford Motor Co. and Walmart Inc., had to quickly ramp up virtual private networks and videoconferencing capabilities so employees could work remotely from home.

Suresh Kumar, Walmart’s global chief technology officer and chief development officer, said his team scaled VPN capabilities by sixfold to accommodate employees of the world’s largest retailer working from home.

Jeff Lemmer, CIO at Ford, said his team transitioned more than 140,000 people to remote work beginning in January, increasing the auto maker’s VPNs by threefold.

Some IT executives are finding that videoconferencing technology has been beneficial to meetings and will continue using it through next year. More frequent use of cameras during remote meetings has increased productivity and teamwork, said Erik Bailey, CIO at software company Anaqua.

Carol Juel, CIO at consumer financial services company Synchrony, said video meetings have leveled the playing field for ideas. “People who previously had been too shy to speak up now (are) much more eager to participate in the virtual environment,” she said, adding that meetings are more productive as a result.

Some IT executives, though, will continue to face challenges related to employees feeling disconnected from each other despite technological enhancements such as videoconferencing. “We hear from our bankers that what they miss most is a sense of belonging, particularly for recent hires,” said Karen Higgins-Carter, CIO at Webster Financial Corp. and its Webster Bank.

Eric Johnson, CIO at SurveyMonkey, says he constantly asks employees how they are doing and what his team can do to make their remote work life easier. He has also taken it upon himself to provide some levity for the online-survey software maker’s employees. “I try to keep things light by smiling, joking, helping others to relax,” Mr. Johnson said.

Write to Sara Castellanos at [email protected]