With the pandemic many companies were forced to adopt work-from-home (WFH) initiatives which meant finding new ways to accommodate this without compromising security. However, many organizations are looking to motivate workers to return back to the workplace yet the majority find themselves in a position of adopting a hybrid workforce.

In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Renu Upadhyay, VP of Product of End User Computing at VMware, to discuss the major announcements from VMware Explore around supporting the hybrid workforce and how VMware is helping to support organizations and its employees.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Maintaining flexibility for the workforce continues to be a key focus with companies looking to stay productive with a remote workforce. While some organizations are trying to bring employees back to the office, many others are wanting to adopt a long-term hybrid model. Upadhyay discusses the challenges this brings such as talent retention and how their Anywhere Workspace platform can help.
• Organizations are experiencing technology challenges as they try to enable employees to work from anywhere with a great experience and without compromising security. Upadhyay shares details of their VMware announcements on automation, simplifying the management of the workspace, their intelligence guided root-cause analysis, the extension of the VMware freestyle orchestrator to mobile devices, giving organizations the ability to spin up a desktop to provide secure access to an employee’s desktop and their next generation architecture for Horizon cloud.
• Upadhyay discusses the differences between automation and autonomous using the example of a self-driving car and how it is aware of all the variables in its environment and how it navigates to get to a given destination. He explains what this means for an autonomous workspace and the benefits to the employee experience.
• In the early days of the pandemic, many companies invested in collaboration tools and had to dial down their security policies so that employees could work from home. Upadhyay discusses the evolution towards organizations realizing WFH is here to stay and them looking towards stabilizing their environment while still giving their employees flexibility and the evolution towards hybrid workplaces.
• Organizations are seeing a number of challenges with workspace design with a hybrid model, whether it’s using personal devices to access corporate VPNs or moving towards cloud-based solutions. Upadhyay explains the focus on making the employee experience seamless and how many organizations are announcing starting to measure employee NPS scores where their employees rate them on the tools.
• Measuring the performance of the digital employee experience is another challenge so that they can log how frequently an application crashes or battery health of a device to then be analyzed. Upadhyay discusses how having the analysis can assist the help desk in shifting left and being able to predict and remediate before the problem occurs. He explains how VMware root-cause analysis can help with this.

Connect with Renu Upadhyay (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Learn more about VMware (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.