Jeff Abbott: Letting people work anywhere is the future of professional employment. That's what more than 4 in 5 knowledge workers told us in a survey we recently conducted earlier this year.
The third annual Everywhere Work report made one thing very clear. Flexibility isn't just a perk or a nice-to-have for top talent. It's non-negotiable. And it's much broader than simply working in the office or from home. All this might sound like an HR concern, but the outcry for flexibility is also fundamentally a technology challenge, which is what we're going to talk about today.
I'm Jeff Abbott, and you're listening to a very special episode of Executive Summary, a podcast where we discuss the latest research into IT security and the future of work and what it all means for your business.
Today we're recording live from Dallas, Texas at Ivanti's Solutions Summit, and we've just wrapped up this morning's keynote where we launched the research we're going to talk about today, and where I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with our guest this episode, Sam Rad.
Samantha Radocchia, aka Sam Rad, in her own words, is a radical futurist and student of humanity. She's a four-time founder whose work focuses on the intersection of frontier technology and the human experience, which makes her the perfect guest for this topic. Sam, so nice to have you on the show.
Samantha Radocchia: Thank you Jeff. So excited to be here.
Jeff Abbott: Sam, before we get into the conversation, let me give our listeners a little background on the research we're citing today.
Ivanti has released our annual Everywhere Work report for three years running now. This report includes responses from over 7,700 executives, IT and security professionals and knowledge workers about how they work today and how they want to work, including the technology infrastructure that's necessary to support them.
And what we're seeing in this research is that each year, support for remote and hybrid working models has grown, and employees are getting bolder about what they want from the workplace. We're no longer simply talking about whether people are working in the office or at home. The conversation is shifting to a broader definition of workplace flexibility that encompasses where, when and how people get the job done.
So, Sam, let's get into this a little bit. 4 in 5 knowledge workers say flexibility is highly valuable to them, and 2 in 5 say they'd actually walk – they'd quit their jobs – to gain more flexibility. What does that emerging standard of flexibility look like, or what could it look like in the near future, from your point of view?
Samantha Radocchia: You know, this can go in a number of directions, and I'm not surprised, right? We have this big shift in 2020 and beyond, where people, I wouldn't say ‘got a taste of the future,’ but it really was an example of what was to come. And so now we're in this phase of kind of figuring out: do we go back? Do we go forward with lessons from the past? What does the future look like?
And I think in terms of people, right? There's the flexibility of our concept of time. So, we we created this concept of a 9-to-5 workday around the Industrial Revolution, 1800s, 1900s. With the shift now to being able to, I wouldn't say outsource, but augment some of those skills. So, productive skills to, let's say, autonomous systems or other technologies, things like creativity and collaboration, whether that's in-person or remote is very important.
And so, the concept then, let's say, of time. People and time. Work has always been structured around time. You could argue time was invented to support work in the Agrarian revolution. Before that, we didn't have a concept really of even mathematical time. So, we think about the rethinking of time. There is both the workday, and how people come together in space, but also – how is that time split up?
Why do we say it needs to be during these hours? I'll speak from my own experience, right? I'm not a consistent person in terms of my daily energy. There are parts of the day where maybe I am more productive as a writer, parts of my day where I take a walk and I recharge, parts of my day where I do things like this! Usually in the morning, right?
It's not the same every day, but the structure of my life is maybe different from your life and from the next person. So when we take one box that worked for everyone or a construct, and now, say the construct's knowledge work or creative work, perhaps then the shifting of how someone conceives of time changes.
Jeff Abbott: Yeah. And, and organizations have to adapt to that. How is it that you manage the expectations of your friends and family? You know, how is it that you manage to satisfy all these various aspects of your life when we're kind of boundless now with where, when and how we work? So I'm trying to give them some thoughts around structuring at least guardrails. But it's hard and people are still learning.
And they say Jeff -- to your point, about 9 to 5 -- we're used to, for example, the IT desk for your company. You have got a problem with your software or your laptop. You know, you know, you can dial in. That IT desk said, you know, we typically, historically have tracked on a graph the amount of volume we get by region of the world, by time of day. And since we've gone to remote work, it's all over the place. And why? Because to your point, people are choosing those periods where they really want to bang work out and need support. And it's not bound by the normal construct, as you said. So, it presents this amazing challenge of boundless sort of work and how IT teams have to cover it.
Samantha Radocchia: To piggyback on that -- so there's time, there's place. So, we're now in the post-information age of globalization, maybe an era where there were more localized corporate entities. We have global corporations, multinational corporations, the rise of remote work, digital nomads. So people most likely not being in the same time zone or physical geographic location. So now you're operating basically on the 24/7 cycle.
Anytime we go through a radical accelerating change, both with convergence of technologies or sociocultural or even geopolitical paradigm shifts, there's a gap. Big gap. The systems aren't necessarily working. We haven't yet built the new structures. So, there's a sort of amorphous blob, a very uncomfortable liminal state in anthropology, we'd call it. We're neither here nor there. We can fill that with all sorts of things. But I certainly am an advocate for structure. So, I'm not saying do away with old structures. Let's put new ones in.
You know, some might do a few days in the office or not. Some might do it quarterly. Some might say, here's three hours during the day that we want to make sure the entire team is overlapping. Whatever that might be will be unique to the unit even within an organization. But it does need to be put in place.
Jeff Abbott: Yeah. To your point, an interesting point within the study, women in the study consistently valued flexibility more highly than men. And so, we think, okay, you have to think that there's a DEIB element to this situation as well. Has that been your observation?
Samantha Radocchia: Absolutely. So, there's, you know, you can extrapolate a lot of things from that, whether they're conclusions, whether it's parents and child rearing and family, it could be also a different type of brain or thinking. I spoke today a lot about left-brain versus right brain thinking.
But I think even beyond gender, and I mentioned this before, different work styles and timing. Some people maybe work better, or learn better, let's say visually or auditorily or through pictures or through reading or writing, right? And we've prioritized even a lot of our systems or hardware interfaces for certain dominant styles.
Different learning styles. Different. I stay away from productivity. I don't love this word. Let's just say creativity or inspiration or innovation, which is a cornerstone for any successful organization, innovation. So how do you encourage creativity, connection and innovation?
Jeff Abbott: This is the better way to say it. Because look, in our business, in IT and security, more and more automation is coming into play. And with generative AI, you know, we don't know yet the limits of what can be replaced in terms of people. So, to your point, this isn't going to be as much productivity anymore. It's going to be creativity. You're going to be freed up for the more difficult challenges that you need a creative mind for.
Samantha Radocchia: And so are the adversaries. If we're talking about security, they're freed up to think creatively about how to target, how to attack. Then you need to be freed up to think about how are we going to be eight steps ahead in prevention? So, to think about how, especially when you're talking about it in security infrastructure, people who are going to compromise the system are not taking a nap at 2 AM
So how do you support that in a global context while supporting people's needs in time and adapt to that as an organization?
Jeff Abbott: To layer on sort of the technology component of this discussion, because without that, none of what we're talking about is really possible. So, one really interesting finding from the research was a massive disconnect between leadership and employees on technology needs. So, 90% of leaders say their employees have the tools and the software they need to be productive outside the traditional office environment. So, you're remote. 90% of us say you're good to go, right? Only 57% far less of the workers themselves said they can easily access the tools and had the proper tools they needed to do their jobs in a remote work environment. Big disconnect. So, first, what do you think's going on with that disconnect?
Samantha Radocchia: I think it's probably a product of the fragmentation and the siloing of systems, something that Ivanti is aiming to solve.
Jeff Abbott: We're trying to.
Samantha Radocchia: That's where my initial impulse would be, that it’s extremely difficult to navigate multiple systems.
Samantha Radocchia: There's probably some of that disconnect would lead to, again, just cumbersome tooling, hardware or perhaps just not having the conversations of what the software needs even are. Yeah, I had a lot of personal experiences with this where people would want to try out new software, new tooling, and it was just not something that we rolled out for the whole organization, or maybe there were security questions.
Which creates a problem, right? Because if people want and are being encouraged to experiment with new tooling, they're not provided the opportunities for sandbox environments to do this in a safe way. It's a Catch-22. So that's something that I would recommend.
Jeff Abbott: One thing that's interesting, going back to the human, the anthropology side of things. I've observed is, look, this new generation, this young generation, as you said, coming up from university or tech schools or elsewhere. They're placing a lot more value on their digital experience. I never would have asked that question when I was their age interviewing. What's the what's the systems look like? What's the infrastructure look like? How easily can I access the tools they are? And in fact, I think, you know, we have Glassdoor these days to rank companies. I think you're going to have a digital experience Glassdoor soon where this generation is going to say, oh great environment. I can get to my tools, excellent software. If I propose something new, they allow me to use it, etc., etc. So, I mean, the, the CIO and by extension the whole, you know, executive suite has now got to start paying attention to what is the experience like inside our enterprise.
Samantha Radocchia: That's a great point. I did some research on this, actually in graduate school. I mean, making those decisions of what the, the tooling, hardware, software and access to even, you know, newer and more experimental, I mean, devices being key.
Jeff Abbott: Yeah. I mean, look, you're right, you're a CIO now. And if you're employing this is a tool we call DEX (digital employee experience) platform. And we have a great tool that allows employers and the IT department by organization, the finance team, the HR team, you know, manufacturing, whatever it may be to measure.
You literally put out a rating systems like Rotten Tomatoes inside the enterprise.
And if you know, if you think about it, if you get good, you can brag right away during recruiting, you can show that rating. And this next generation of knowledge worker, they want digital experience. They want purpose. Yeah. They want value. The power shifted.
Samantha Radocchia: Absolutely. And, you know, in my mid, I'd say it was second and third company, was Silicon Valley, you know, competitive San Francisco landscape.
Anything that you would imagine in like a TV show or movie, we lived in. You know, people actually didn't want that.
What they wanted was lifelong learning. So, you know, budgets towards continuing to upskill both, in and out of their professional track. You know, and. Yeah. Opportunities to grow, but also purpose and so on.
What we saw was that people actually wanted to track contributions, in a flexible environment, both in office or distributed. How do you track that? And how do you reward it?
Jeff Abbott: Sure. You know, in our business, the value metrics of the enterprise have changed a lot in the last ten years. And I'm talking at the macro level, right. In our business, it is, the percent of reoccurring revenue. Great public cloud, right? The percent, that is. You know, overall annual reoccurring revenue, meaning same customers continuing to stay on your product in the cloud. Cross-sell all of these new metrics, that create, okay, here's the enterprise value of that company. And so, to your point, you know, management is now having to rethink: okay, then how do we properly incentivize the behaviors to continue to raise those metrics right and create shareholder value.
Samantha Radocchia: Right. The point I really like, you know, it comes down to the purpose and passion, really is about trust. We as human beings tend to have the impulse to want to construct, control, restrict. And it's almost the opposite impulse that we need in a moment like this, which is openness, trust, and optimism. And again, it sounds a little naive to say that, but it's actually the thing that in terms of employee growth, creativity, innovation, retention, you almost have to just to have that trust that they will again self-select, figure it out, learn and grow.
Jeff Abbott: We're actually now building into our professional development remote management, remote leadership. You know how to, you know, monitor the overall culture of your team remotely. How to monitor, obviously, productivity and performance.
It's an entirely new skill set we have to develop. And, you know, I think you're going to find yourself in a position where you'll have limits to how far you go in your career these days if you don't develop these skills.
So, Sam, in light of everything we've discussed today, if there is one thing, one thing you would tell our listeners to do differently based on these conditions, what would it be?
Samantha Radocchia: One thing is tough, and I'm going to keep this simple, because we're in a moment of shift. I call it society level neurogenesis. This means forming new neural pathways in the brain.
Let's take a different walk home, drive a different path. Don't use a map. Try it, right? I think forming these new connections are the most fundamental things, and they're quite simple to foster flexibility and adaptability in your own life. And you can then bring that into the work life.
Jeff Abbott: That's really good. Embrace and adapt. Yeah. Yeah. Really good. Well, Sam, again, thank you so much for being here.
Samantha Radocchia: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Jeff Abbott: Look, if you liked what you heard today, be sure to subscribe and even better, share this podcast with a friend. You can see the research we discussed today at Ivanti.com/everywhere work. Or just follow the links in the show notes and you can find out more about Ivanti and our solutions at Ivanti I-V-A-N-T-I dot com or follow us on social media at @GoIvanti. I'm your host, Jeff Abbott, and I hope to see you next time on Executive Summary.