Discussing Hybrid Work with GlobalLogic’s Sunny Azadeh

Business leaders everywhere are evaluating technologies to take hybrid work to the next level, and GlobalLogic’s CIO Sunny Azadeh is no exception. She has a unique perspective on the challenges of hybrid work: She joined GlobalLogic just three months before the start of the pandemic. Four of their key team members joined during the pandemic. During that time, GlobalLogic acquired a company and hired 6,000 people – and then Hitachi took over them. That’s a lot of change in extremely challenging circumstances.

What are Azadeh’s top takeaways of 2020/2021? And what will keep you busy in 2022? As part of our ongoing hybrid work series, we sat down with this Cisco customer (via Webex, of course) to learn more.

Q: First, what does GlobalLogic do?

A: GlobalLogic has been consulting, designing and building amazing software and digital products for over 20 years. Over 90% of our employees are engaged in delivering software and digital products to our customers.

Q: Tell me a little about your experience during the peak of the pandemic.

A: I personally joined three months before the pandemic. Four of my key team members joined during the pandemic. During this time, not only have we acquired a UK company, Hitachi has also acquired us. We onboarded 6,000 employees during the pandemic – including our Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Legal Officer. We also started our IT transformation in 5 different time zones with large programs that required broad participation without the benefit of having staff on site during requirements gathering and conference room pilots.

An added twist of having families at home, my daughter was taking her bar exam while my son was taking his online classes and my meetings started at 5am. At one point my son wanted to go to a hotel or Airbnb so he could sleep. In many ways 2020 and 2021 seems to be a very long, very fast moving year! There were certainly some tense moments.

Q: Wow! That is a lot. How was it?

A: Many of our environments—both our customers’ and our own—were designed for the physical office. When the pandemic began, we had to quickly transition from supporting seven development centers to 17,000 individual home offices. We now support 23,000 when you add 6,000 people who boarded during the pandemic.

With our providers, including Cisco, we have improved our infrastructure and increased our cyber security. We have implemented our business continuity plans very well. We were able to secure laptops and equipment and move labs so we could start working remotely.

Since then remote work and now hybrid work has been a mixed bag for us. Partly good, partly challenging.

Q: It’s a new year, so let’s be optimistic and start with the good!

A: Ok – from a talent perspective, hybrid work was a big win. Everyone enjoys the time savings without commuting. Also, you can hire talent anywhere. I hired three people in North America during the pandemic and they are not located near the headquarters. In IT, we hire talent anywhere, regardless of the location of the office worldwide. This allows us to onboard the best talent and not compete in local markets where the same talent is in high demand.

Q: OK, so now to the rest of the “mixed bag”. What was challenging?

A: There are certainly many challenges. The ones I’m most focused on right now are remote recruiting, onboarding and career development; Cooperation; and connectivity.

Q: Let’s go through each one individually. First up: remote onboarding, recruitment and career development.

A: The pandemic has shown us that remote onboarding has its challenges. The IT part of this is pretty much resolved; We automatically provision laptops remotely and manage security patches remotely. But the human side of things, connecting them to the company culture and welcoming them appropriately into the company – that’s something else.

Traditionally, the development of a sense of belonging takes place at the physical location. So now we need to work on making new hires feel included when onboarding through Webex.

Taking a step back, we see that we face some of the same challenges when attracting and retaining candidates throughout the recruitment cycle and hiring process. How do we keep the personal connection when they’re not coming to a company location to meet potential teammates? It is time to reconsider this too. And then if you fast forward, you see that you face similar challenges as the employee progresses in their career. Career development, coaching, mentoring – in my view, the entire workforce management must be thought outside of ERP thinking.

They need a system of interaction with people and a career path that is presented to them. They need to have learning paths that aren’t traditional learning paths and have a buddy system for people who come on board. If we help them to be more successful, Good be more successful. There’s an opportunity to think this through from a technology perspective – it’s part HR support, part employee communications, part technology. It’s a great opportunity to solve it.

Q: I guess collaboration isn’t just an issue, right? It’s multifaceted.

A: Definitely. We’re very interested in solving some of the big challenges we’ve seen over the last few months. For example, how do you prevent video conferencing fatigue? We operate in Central Europe and India, have offices in Germany and have acquired a business in the UK. And now, with the Hitachi acquisition, we have a completely different time zone in Japan. So, I can personally address video conferencing fatigue. There are more meetings than ever; Much of what happened as side talks in the hallway now takes place in a meeting. On the employee side, we are very aware that we need to encourage the way remote water dispensers interact – getting people to interact as if they were in the office when they are out of the office. I think it’s the key.

We take a fresh look at how we conduct meetings in the first place. Is there an optimal size or structure? How do you use video sensibly when 60 people from five time zones are in the virtual meeting room? What should change if half is on site and the other half is virtual?

To make things even more challenging, what happens when many of these people have no history with each other — if they’ve never broken bread together? What can we do about language barriers? As you can see, we’re looking well beyond basic file sharing, video conferencing, and whiteboarding.

I just held our IT Summits with cross-functional leadership from India and Ukraine. Of the 50 participants, just over half, including myself, were there. The rest was in a four hour video call. It was so good to have this conversation on the spot. We’ve spoken and connected and focused on priorities and how we can scale the business together. It was wonderful. But the experience wasn’t all that great for the remote participants. We’ll have to do better. The on-site discussion was so lively that those at a distance did not even have the opportunity to participate. The most interesting thing was that we had very specific topics – it wasn’t a general brainstorming “What should we do with our IT strategy and roadmap?”. They were very important initiatives, so you might think it would be easier to get everyone involved and keep them.

We also look at very specific points in time where historically we have all sat in the same conference room for large projects – for example at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of large projects. How can we do this effectively if we cannot plan to be able to travel? The variants show us that hybrid work is going to be a way of life, so we need to think these things through.

Q: Are there specific technologies you are investigating?

A: We’re exploring the role different technologies can and should play – things like holograms, whiteboards, translation, meeting notes, and polling tools.

Q: Tell me about the next iteration of your infrastructure to support hybrid work.

A: We always try to make it simpler, in terms of firewall structure, in terms of Active Directory architecture in the cloud. I’m thinking how we can backup 17,000 locations more easily. One of the things that still presents a challenge is connectivity; What your connectivity looks like depends a lot on where you live and who your service provider is. Our IT team can’t go to people’s homes and say, ‘okay, let me secure and analyze your internet so all your devices like dishwashers, smart washers, fridges, TVs and Alexa come here and this segment will its your working environment.” That is why we want to increase safety even further.

We must continuously monitor at multiple levels to ensure the Company’s reputation, assets and people are safe. Ideally we’d like to get to a point where employees pick up their security box and have their WAN, LAN and firewall – it goes with them wherever they go. We want to do this on a global level.

Q: Any advice for readers tackling issues like the ones we discussed today?

A: I think it’s important to focus on the fact that no company, unless you might be talking about a manufacturing facility, will ever go back 100 percent local. It is clear that hybrid work is the future of work. The next phase of hybrid work will require many innovations in remote collaboration, remote networking, web-to-go, and cloud security layers—to protect the endpoint, email, and user identity.

Here at GlobalLogic, we’re working with Hitachi Japan’s CIO to consider exactly what our new workplace will need. And we’re brainstorming with key vendors like Cisco to define what the future will be like. It is a great responsibility and a great opportunity to completely change the way we work for the better.

To learn more about Cisco hybrid work solutions, go to here.