Moving Forward as a Digital-First Leader
Now that the initial shock of moving to widespread remote work has largely worn off, businesses need to look ahead to how they can incorporate some of the things they’ve learned moving forward. Gelsinger said that he anticipates much of the way we work changing forever.
“If we think about VMware, before the pandemic, we were about 20 percent working from home,” he said. “And then, of course, like everybody else, we shifted to about 97 percent. Right now, with a few offices reopening, we're in the low 90s. I expect the new normal for us will be that 10 to 20 percent will be office dwellers, probably 30 percent will be hybrid work-from-home, and a full 50-plus percent will always be a remote workforce to us.”
While companies have been working like this for a while, it’s still going to be hard work to adjust to a distributed workforce in the long term.
“This is the new normal, and this is a huge shift,” Gelsinger said. “As a result, we're going to close some of our smaller offices. We’re going to redesign some of our central campuses and we’re going to move away from what I call ’hotels for offices’ to make them centers for collaboration and innovation. Overall, it’s a dramatic rethink in what a workforce looks like in the future.”