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In April, 2021, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced\u00a0he would let all 75,000 employees work remotely indefinitely<\/a>, even after the COVID-19 pandemic ended. The company had seen no drop in productivity by allowing employees to work from home and expected to save money by not fully staffing offices. When and how often employees should come into the office would be up to their managers, who abide by a flexible hybrid policy.<\/p>\n But that shift brought technology challenges most companies are by now familiar with: how do you secure networks when the employee\u2019s home is essentially a branch office? How do you create company culture from afar? And, how do you retain employees at a time when IT talent is in historically high demand.<\/p>\n Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn<\/p>\n Fletcher Previn took over as Cisco\u2019s CIO in April 2022. Since then, his focus has primarily been on all of thoe issues. Prior to arriving at Cisco, Previn worked at IBM for 15 years, the last four as its CIO.\u00a0<\/p>\n Previn wasn\u2019t necessarily fated for work in IT. His parents \u2014 composer and conductor Andr\u00e9 Previn<\/a> and actress Mia Farrow<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 initially pulled him toward entertainment. But Previn realized technology was his passion.<\/p>\n He spoke to Computerworld<\/em> about the challenges he faces and the lessons he\u2019s learned. The following are excerpts from that interview.<\/p>\n What are your main goals for the future of Cisco?<\/strong> \u201cWhat was exciting about the opportunity at Cisco [were] two things: One, is I believe in the mission. If you were to remove all Cisco technology from the world it would be a very different planet. Cisco basically built the public internet and created the global village we live in \u2014 connecting everything and everyone. That\u2019s a mission I feel passionately about, and empowering an equal future for all is part of our mission statement.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of my focus at IBM had been to to lead with experience and create these highly designed, simplified experiences both for employees and customers \u2013 if you want people to build best-in-class experiences, you need to deliver best-in-class experiences because today\u2019s best experience is tomorrow\u2019s minimal expectation.<\/p>\n \u201cI love the focus on that and really getting after the complexity in things and simplifying it…. I\u2019m hoping to enable people to do the best work of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n What got you into IT? What do you love about it? <\/strong>\u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in technology. I got a Commodore 64 when I was like six, and then I headed down the PC route and built my own x86 clone because the IBM PC was too expensive. In 1984, my parents bought the original Mac \u2014\u00a0the 128K Mac<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 for the whole family when it came out. I had a lot of brothers and sisters and there was a sign-up sheet, and I\u2019d get up 4:30 in morning to reserve time on the Mac. It was like the old mainframe days when you had to schedule your time.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just always captivated me that to some degree you can do anything you can imagine on this thing. You\u2019re not limited by anything but your own imagination…. And then when you interconnect these things…, you get orders of magnitude more value.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember I got a modem shortly thereafter; it was probably around 1985, and I remember hooking up to CompuServe and later AOL. I found the interconnectedness of things really interesting. There was a while when I thought I\u2019d like to go into entertainment; that was more the family business. My dad was a musician and my mom\u2019s an actress. I spent time on movie sets and I was an intern at the Letterman show and the Conan O\u2019Brien show, but it was telling me something when I was working at Universal Studios on a movie that to some degree I was more interested in exploring the phone system than in the story telling they were doing. When I was in college, I decided I should really stop fighting this. What I\u2019m really drawn to is the technology.<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents are baffled by what I do…. They\u2019re very proud of my career, but it\u2019s a little mysterious to them nonetheless.\u201d<\/p>\n How is Cisco approaching the dearth in available IT talent? Are you removing some college degree requirements and focusing more on skills-based hiring? <\/strong>\u201cI can tell you that in my own organization, I\u2019m hiring on experience, but also just curiosity and passion, more than degrees. I\u2019m looking more for people who are kind, passionate about what they do for a living, and believe in our mission. I\u2019ll almost always hire for curiosity and interest over experience and degree any day of the week. If you enjoy what you do and you\u2019re interested in it, you\u2019re going to be successful at it.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2021, Cisco announced it would not require any of its 75,000 employees to return to the office. For IT in particular, that\u2019s a tricky policy \u2014 what is your policy regarding hybrid work? <\/strong>\u201cOur policy around hybrid work is that we want the office to be a magnet and not a mandate. In all likelihood, the role of the office is for most people not going to be a place where you go eight hours a day to do work. It\u2019s going to be a place where we occasionally gather for some purpose. And, so as a result, we\u2019re not mandating any particular prescriptive for how many days people should be in the office. It\u2019s totally based on the type of work teams do, how collaborative that works needs to be, does it really benefit from people being together, or is it really individual work. And that\u2019s really best determined at the individual team level than any sort of an arbitrary formula.<\/p>\n \u201cThe value of being in the office is proportionate to the number of other people who are also in the office at the same time you\u2019re there. So, these things tend to be more about gathering for a team meeting, a client briefing, a white boarding session and the like.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen everybody was remote, it was a great equalizer because everyone was on a similar footing. Hybrid is a somewhat more complicated thing to solve in that you\u2019ve got this total employee wellbeing to consider, including physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, financial health, and being able to productive in your job. I mostly live and operate in the productivity quadrant of that formula. But as soon as you\u2019re in a hybrid world, you\u2019re bringing in the complexity of bringing some into the office and some not. So, how do you create an environment where people are not disadvantaged by that \u2014 that you don\u2019t have a system of haves and have-nots where there\u2019s a group of people in a conference room together speaking softly and laughing at inside jokes and people who are remote struggling to see or hear what\u2019s going on in the office.<\/p>\n \u201cWorking remotely removed a certain number of stressors, but it introduced other ones. So, you don\u2019t have a long commute and perhaps you can get away with wearing sweatpants for work, and that\u2019s all good. But is your internet reliable? Do you have a quiet place to work? Do you have a remote work setup that is high quality enough that you can read body language, detect non-verbal cues, understand when you\u2019re losing the attention of the person you\u2019re speaking with, and all those things you\u2019d benefit from if you were in a conference room together. So, I\u2019ve experienced the hybrid work journey, which I guess we\u2019ll eventually just call work because all work will eventually become hybrid, in these three phases of technology, security, and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n What about technological issues? How did the pandemic affect that? <\/strong>\u201cI had to ask what does it mean from a security perspective if I have people doing remote school, and playing video games, and smart thermostats potentially on the same networks as people doing critical work? What do we need to do from a security perspective to shore up our boundaries where we feel we have the right level of visibility, observability, and manageability that we can manage the environment? You\u2019re never really done with that, but at some point you feel you\u2019re on top of that.<\/p>\n \u201cThen you enter the\u2026 phase, which we\u2019re in now; the much more complex, nuanced, cultural aspects of work. This is not a temporary arrangement. What are the long-term consequences of working this way?<\/p>\n “We\u2019ve had a lot of experience as to what it\u2019s like to be in an office, but it\u2019s a big reset and everybody gets a do-over for doing hybrid work. That\u2019s the exciting part. The organizations that figure this out will win. If you\u2019re in IT, we get to be the designers for what the future of work feels like.<\/p>\n \u201cYour culture is the only unique thing you have and your culture is the result of how work gets done. So, in the moment it may feel like you\u2019re making tactical decisions about your network, or VPN, or zero trust or collaboration, but in totality IT is a very prominent participant in designing the future of work. Collectively, these decisions add up to what it feels like to work somewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cSo, we spend a lot of time thinking about…IT as a driver of culture change, how we fulfill our calling of creating an equal future for all and an equitable remote hybrid work experience. Some of that is technical. There are things in our products that can take a conference room and chop it up [virtually], and make it so each person gets their own \u2018Brady Bunch\u2019 square, so you\u2019re on an equal footing with those who are working remotely. [There are] things like noise cancellation and virtual backgrounds. But there\u2019s also a lot of exciting innovation around the collaboration space to address that problem.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an IT department, you have to solve remote access, network connectivity, software-defined WAN, how you\u2019re doing private peering and zero trust so you don\u2019t have to back-haul all that traffic over the VPN to be able to inspect all that traffic and know what\u2019s going on. How do you secure endpoints and how do you really know what the experience your employees are having in a hybrid world across networks you don\u2019t own or manage?<\/p>\n \u201cThat requires an understanding of the global internet backbone, the SaaS providers you\u2019re using. In my case, ThousandEyes<\/a> is a great tool that helps me with that. But you can see the set of things you need to solve for as an IT department is much more complicated and broader than just what tool you have to be using for a meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n How do you create or sustain company culture in this environment? <\/strong>\u201cI do think it is a more challenging problem to solve in terms of how to create a sense of togetherness, purpose,[and] \u00a0mission alignment when everyone is not together, [without] the same serendipitous interactions with each other that they\u2019d have if they were in person.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes I talk about this in terms of a \u2018relationship bank.’ If you and I see each other in the office and I ask, \u2018How are your children doing? Do you want to grab a bite in the cafeteria?\u2019 Those are deposits into our relationship bank. And then when we\u2019re asking things of each other in a work setting, we\u2019re making withdrawals.<\/p>\n \u201cIf all you have is withdrawals and no deposits, you end up in a relationship deficit and work becomes transactional, which is not good. All of us are going to spend more time working than doing anything else, and so this has to have some deeper meaning; it can\u2019t just be a transactional relationship.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been experimenting with things to address this. As a company, I think there\u2019s a level of informativity that came with hybrid work that\u2019s going to remain, which I think is a good thing. …In times past, you may not have asked somebody about their stress levels or their fatigue levels or how their personal life is going. And now I think that is a part of a wholesome, totally employee view of their wellbeing.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cTransparency has increased, and I think it\u2019s something Cisco works very hard at. All of the senior leadership team, including the CEO, have these quarterly townhall meetings where the whole company is invited to participate and the leadership team shares what\u2019s going on, what\u2019s top of mind, what questions they\u2019re hearing from the workforce. The workforce is encouraged to engage in a dialogue, and they do. Those questions are answered very candidly.<\/p>\n \u201cMy own management system for my team is trying to do some deliberate things to re-create some of what would happen in the office if we were all together. So, for example, every morning I have a check-in with my team for 30 minutes, and that\u2019s just 30 minutes top of mind. It\u2019s not a meeting for my benefit to ask status of projects. It\u2019s for my team to be able to say here\u2019s what\u2019s top of mind for them and these are the things other people should be aware of, here are blockers I need help with. Then I have a weekly staff meeting. Then we have a monthly operating review with each of my directs, which is a one-hour, one-on-one going through their OKRs [objectives and key results].<\/p>\n \u201cThen, once a month we come together in person as a team and once a quarter we spend two days together doing calibration of our OKRs and any adjustment we think is necessary, either for our OKRs or our strategy. That at least gets a cadence of talking to each other every day, and we\u2019re coming together in person at least once a month.<\/p>\n \u201c…I think there is a lot of interesting analysis being done on what does a productive hybrid workday look like? Being busy is not the same thing as being productive. If I\u2019m not actively managing this, it\u2019s not uncommon for days where I don\u2019t have time to go to the bathroom, and I\u2019m at home. That would be very odd in the office \u2014 to have 16, 30-minute meetings back-to-back with no break. Your calendar doesn\u2019t lie. Your calendar is a reflection of your priorities.<\/p>\n http:\/\/www.computerworld.com\/category\/security\/index.rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"