Chef Security Officer Phil Richards and Head of Endpoint Security Product Management Chris Goettl talk about managing employees and protecting users in a new post-COVID era, in which 1,600+ survey respondents confirm that no workplace will ever return to solely on-premises employment.
Find out who on the podcast wears pants to video calls (and who doesn't!), plus:
Chef Security Officer Phil Richards and Head of Endpoint Security Product Management Chris Goettl talk about managing employees and protecting users in a new post-COVID era, in which 1,600+ survey respondents confirm that no workplace will ever return to solely on-premises employment.
Find out who on the podcast wears pants to video calls (and who doesn't!), plus:
Adrian: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Ivanti Insights podcast. This is episode nine. I'm your host, Adrian Vernon. Today, I'm joined by our usual cast of characters. We have Phil Richards, our Chief Security Officer at Ivanti, and Chris Goettl, Senior Director of Product Management here at Ivanti as well.
Gentlemen, welcome. Great to have you both together here this time around. Phil, we missed you the last couple of episodes when we were on with the world's most connected human, Chris Dancy.
Phil: That is exciting. I listened to it. It was engaging and wonderful. I'm glad I wasn't I wasn't there to ruin everything.
Adrian: Phil, you're not giving yourself enough credit. You're not going to ruin anything here. We're glad to have you back in the fold. Today, guys, we're talking about the everywhere workplace and the findings from a new Ivanti survey. This survey which just released this week, polled 1,900 adults in the US and UK who worked remotely at some point in the past year.
Now, guys, I have to tell you these results, you might be surprised by what percentage indicates they take a shower, go to the bathroom, or don't wear any pants during a meeting. Now, I'm not talking about PJ's; pajama bottoms. Many of us do that, but I'm talking no pants at all. We're going to save those stats for later. Let's drill into some of the other key business findings.
A couple of stats that jumped out to me from this study are that 64% of respondents would rather be able to work from anywhere than get a promotion. And 49% would be willing to take a pay cut in exchange for being able to work from anywhere. The final stat I'll throw at you and let you absorb is 48% of respondents claim they're working more during non-office hours than before the pandemic, as a result of being home.
Chris, let's start with you. What does this mean for organizations moving forward?
Chris: If you think about how people were working pre-COVID, I live over an hour away from the office. I live in Minnesota, so it could have been based on... we have two seasons here. There's road construction and winter.
So depending on how that goes, if there's road construction along that stretch of highway that I'm on, those could back up my drive quite a bit. If it's a winter-related thing, if the storm was coming in and I didn't leave the office by a certain time, there was a one-way drive that I had that was about three and a half hours. So if you think about just something like that, that's in Minnesota. There are places like Chicago, the west coast, and other areas where the drives are even more outrageous at times.
A lot of that doesn't really surprise me. I worked from home one day a week before. So I'd go into the office Monday through Thursday and I'd work home on Fridays. And it was a great balance for me pre-COVID. Post-COVID, I think I'll probably get down to like two to three days a week that I'd work remote and I'd be saving on gas. I'd be saving over a couple of hours a day on an average day, and in some cases, three or more hours.
That is a huge amount of additional time and money saved right there. Would I be willing to work a few extra hours because I don't have to spend that time in the car? Probably. Would I be willing to take a bit of a pay cut or maybe be locked in at the pay grade that I'm at and not get some increases for a while? Probably because, again, I'm still saving a lot of money on wear and tear on my vehicle, on gas money, on time spent in commutes, and things like that instead. So, not surprising you coming from my perspective.
Adrian: Phil, I'm going to toss it over to you. Let's go back to the stuff that I mentioned a minute ago. 48% say that they're working more in the pandemic world as a result of working from home. And Chris, you and I talked about this offline a few days ago, that predictability of people being online from eight to five or nine to five, that's all gone. Phil, what does that mean as we move forward?
Phil: Well, it means a couple of different things. Number one is it gets us a lot closer to the ability to use a follow-the-sun model when it comes to staffing. I mean, we can staff people up for when they're awake during their daytime hours and expect better results as a result of the pandemic than we've had previously.
And let me just give you a quick example. I recently hired a new person on my team and she happens to be working remotely. For that position, before the pandemic, without question, I would have had to have that person local. I would not have thought that the job could be done in a 100% remote situation. Now, post-pandemic, I didn't even have a second thought about not hiring that person to be able to work remotely. I have total confidence that the job can be done remotely.
I have more confidence and I'm sure that a lot of managers are in the same boat. I'm more confident that the job can be done remotely than I did before having had the experience where everybody was remote for the past year and three or four months. That's really one of the major takeaways when it comes to what we are seeing in terms of changes around productivity for remote workers.
Adrian: Phil, let's stick with you on this. Let's go back to the stat that 64% of respondents would rather be able to work from anywhere than get a promotion. Now, tack that on. People really do want to work from home or anywhere as we move forward. It's not totally up to them. Now, only 14% say they'd like to head back to the office full-time, but it's not totally their choice.
As you talk with your peers around the industry, where do you expect organizations to head with this? And what mandates are they going to make or not make?
Phil: Well, it's a good question. I think one of the things that really needs to come out of this and is coming out of this is organizations, especially the IT component in a lot of organizations are realizing that they need to be accommodating of remote or hybrid work model.
And this is going to be challenging to a lot of organizations that have spent money on infrastructure, making sure that employees are able to work well from the office. Now, when I hire a new person, I need to make sure that hardware equipment is not only shipped to them but that it's adequately configured. That their home network meets or exceeds the needs of the business. That, from a security perspective, we need to make sure that we're extending security protections to those remote workers and to their remote work situations. Sometimes, which involves home networks and home IOT and things like that.
Those are additional big challenges. It's really up to the IT teams to ensure that they're delivering that access that employees need as a top priority for the organization. I think the challenge now becomes not that they only have to worry about the network in the office, but also they have to worry about networks at home.
One of the interesting things I saw was another study that Ivanti put out in February, and this is The 2021 Secure Consumer Cyber Report. And it found that 24% of consumers in the United States and 20% in the UK were using work email and passwords to log in to other online accounts that had nothing to do with their work.
What that means is that when those other services are compromised and we've seen several places where those services are hacked and passwords are dumped and things like that, then work credentials are now available in the open market. And we've seen a lot of situations where that is occurring.
So, IT teams need to be all the more vigilant around user credentials, access, either rotating passwords or a different sort of mechanism, maybe the zero trust model or passwordless authentication so that users' credentials aren't borrowed and aren't leveraged with other cloud services that maybe have nothing to do with work at all.
Adrian: I'm going to throw this out to both of you. It's some speculation. We're going to put you in prediction mode. We're going to put you in Oracle mode and, Chris, we're going to start with you. We heard Phil a couple of minutes ago say he had an employee where he thought there's no way that job could be done remotely and now having been forced to have that person work remotely.
It opened his eyes that this really isn't a problem. How many other Phil Richards are there around the globe who have had their eyes open in that way? And will 86% of organizations say, "Yes, it's fine for you to work fully from home," the way that 86% of respondents are saying, "I don't want to go back to the office full time."
Chris: I think that there's definitely going to be a lot of people who are going to change their mentality about that. There are certain things that require you to have more face-to-face interactions. Let's take engineers, product managers; a place of the world that I live in every day. I have to interact with all of my product managers in my team. They have to interact with the product groups that they work with; engineers.
It's a lot easier to work with an engineering team when you're crossing over the same time zone, when you're able to be able to go to the office and have those interactions. Yes, at the start of a project, you may need to have a deeper, whiteboarding, architectural discussion. But once you get into day-to-day mode for that release, you could get to the point where there's a lot more remote work and occasional sync ups.
So, I think a lot of organizations are going to find many roles can go. They're going to have these cyclical periods of work that require better interaction and periods of work that can go into that remote work mode for extended periods and be successful.
With my team, I'm fully expecting that I'm going to have certain key points during release cycles where I will be wanting them to be deeper into face-to-face discussions with their engineering teams, and other parts of the release cycle where it's day-to-day and they can let the engineers do their thing and only reach out when there's need for clarification or things like that. And then my group could focus on other activities that they can do outside of the office that don't require those deeper interactions.
So I think a lot of us are going to find roles that can handle that hybrid. But I don't think too many companies are going to find 100% work remotely. I think it'll be somewhere in between.
Adrian: Phil, how about you? Do you put it in between? Do you put it closer to 100%? Where do you fall on this?
Phil: I think it's going to be in between. Clearly, humans crave human interaction and contact, and there's going to continue to be some of that. Synergies work better when people are together in a lot of circumstances. That being said, there is definitely going to be more remote work, more desire for people to be able to work from home.
The reality is with transportation the way it is right now, I can be anywhere in the United States, literally, overnight. So, I don't necessarily need to be living in a place where the office is. Oftentimes corporations are spread across the United States or around the world anyway. So being at one place minimally reduces your chance of needing to travel.
That being said, there certainly are going to be a number of corporations that are going to insist that employees need to be local. And one of the things that's going to be challenging and a lot of corporations are going to deal with this is they're going to have to do the calculation.
If I require that my staff be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example, that means that I can hire in Tulsa, Oklahoma only. And my competitor might be hiring across the entire globe, which means that the competitor has access to more talent, he's able to fill positions more quickly, and able to get people spun up and started faster.
That's going to be a competitive advantage and companies are going to be faced with that. And they're going to be doing that calculation. Eventually, companies that are even a little bit more stodgy about needing to have people back in the office are going to find that, in order to be competitive, they're going to have to offer the ability to work remotely.
Adrian: I think that's a great angle and that's a great thought, that competitive advantage. Organizations are going to be pushed by others in their industry to perhaps follow suit in order to keep up. That's a great point.
Now, before we dive into how many people have admitted that they haven't worn pants on a call or they've been in a shower or going to the bathroom; before we get there, one other thing, and this should be a little more of the darker side of what we've seen in the past year. 40% have admitted they're concerned about the lack of physical movement throughout the day.
And the Office of National Statistics, ONS, which is in the UK reported in May that we're seeing an increase of more than double the number of adults experiencing depression than before the pandemic. It's gone up from 10% to 21%.
Now, that may not all be attributable to working from home, obviously. The pandemic has had a big role in that. But you both being people managers, what kind of stake are you going to put for your teams and encourage your peers to put in their teams on employee health moving forward?
Chris: I definitely have taken additional steps to make sure that my employees are taking those mental breaks. I've got teams across the globe from India all the way to the west coast. I want to make sure that on a Friday, my India and Romania PMs are not being sucked into a call at five o'clock on a west coast time, which is in the middle of the night for them.
There are certain things like that that I'm trying to make sure that people are conscious of. If you are taking some longer calls or some early calls, take a break somewhere in the middle of the day. Go get a bike ride in, go take a walk over lunch, go do something like that. If you need to go to a doctor's appointment or something like that, we're able to work flexibly. Go do that appointment that you need to and respond to the things that are urgent when you get back into the office.
So encouraging those things, but also leading by example. If I've got to take a doctor's appointment, letting my team know through Teams or Slack or whatever you're using or via an email, "Hey guys, I'm going to be out of the office for about an hour and a half here for an appointment. I'll be back in and around this time." Having that type of example coming from you helps to encourage them that it's okay to be able to step away and then come back and respond to things later.
When it comes to the end of the week, encourage them to make sure to take that long break. As we're recording this one, we're coming into a holiday weekend in the US. I made sure to touch base with every one of my team members before they either left early for vacation or as they were wrapping up their day to say, "Hey, make sure to disconnect this weekend. I want you back in next week, fully recharged. So don't spend time stressing yourself out on things. Go enjoy yourself."
We definitely have to be more conscious of that. We've all been contained, for this past year, in a way that many people have never really had to experience before. And a lot of people are struggling with it.
Adrian: Yeah, I agree. Phil, is there anything you might expand upon and what Chris threw out there?
Phil: Chris said it all quite well. The only thing is just to underscore how important it is, as managers, to stay in touch with your team. Make sure that you know what they're doing, what they're working on.
I've come to realize that certain individuals take responsibility very personally. And if you don't check on them, they will work themselves into 60, 70, 80, 90-hour workweeks without asking permission or without asking for any kind of relief. And you'll find out about it when they decide to leave the organization, which is the wrong thing for the whole group. It's bad for the employee and it's bad for the team.
One of the things that we do, to one of Chris's other points, we have a Friday music roundup where everybody gets to share a couple of different pieces of music that they enjoy and we make it theme-based and everything like that. And I've got a team that's global. So it's really interesting to see how our music tastes vary from around the world. So, lots of fun things you can do to try to lighten things up, to try to turn the team into more of a personal friend-at-work situation and not just a colleague where you're interacting at a job all the time.
Adrian: And I would say those musical tastes are not just varying by culture or by region, but also by generation as you have multi-generational team members across the spectrum.
All right. Guys, let's wrap things up. At the top of the show, I threw out a couple of teasers there. And we're going to reveal this now. 16% of respondents in this survey we were talking about have taken video calls while not wearing pants. Now, I can understand the 46% of respondents who wore pajama pants, but no pants at all? Really?
Phil: Two things here. First of all, I don't feel like I need to know the pants habits of any of the team members on my team. Secondly, just in case anybody is wondering, I'm definitely a pants-on kind of a guy. That's really all I want to say about that. I don't think there's anything particularly safe in that space.
Adrian: All right. Chris, you were saying, "Hey, you know what? This kind of introduces a whole new angle of hygiene and not just security hygiene.” Do you agree?
Chris: No, a whole big part of my product portfolio focuses on device hygiene: patch management, app control, privilege management, good security hygiene at the device level. Showering? Not wearing pants? That's a whole different level of hygiene that I don't know if I want to know about on those calls.
So yeah, some of that is a little bit shocking. I definitely know the pajama pants one. I've had team members who joined a call really early in the morning and they were still in pajamas. That was totally cool. I didn't comment on the bedhead or anything. It was all good. But no pants at all? Don't forget about it and stand up.
Phil: Chris, you're bringing up a really interesting point, which is we've seen kids march through Teams calls and dogs barking in the middle of Teams calls. I think it embarrasses the person whose child or dog it is more than everybody else. I think we're all learning to be quite adaptable in those situations because everybody's got it. We've got little kids running around the house and pets and emergencies and all that kind of stuff. That's just real life happening.
Chris: Absolutely.
Adrian: I totally agree, Phi. When that happens on a call that I'm on, that doesn't phase me in the least when I'm the one observing it. But it does seem like the person that it's happening to gets a little flushed. I just think that's natural.
Then the final stat is 29% say they used the bathroom or took a shower while on a conference call. That's where that mute button really comes in handy.
Chris: Yeah. Just remember to use the mute button, double-check, please.
Phil: That's not the time that you want to be messing up and having the mute button on when you think it's off.
Chris: Yeah, video too.
Adrian: All right, guys. Thanks for the time today. We will wrap things up. Enjoy your three-day weekend. Even though we're recording this a few days before release, we're having a Memorial Day weekend here in the US and this will be released in early June.
So, guys, have a great holiday weekend, and folks, until next time, stay safe, be secure, and keep smiling.