The evolution of work: One company’s storySymantec’s chief human­resources officer, Rebecca Ranning

The evolution of work: One company’s storySymantec’s chief human­resources officer, Rebecca Ranninger, describes the security software company’stransition to a virtual workplace while reflecting on the promise ­­ and perils ­­ of new ways of working.The physical part of work ­­ where and how it’s done ­­ is shifting in big ways. We all recognize the signs: you’llschedule a meeting and you’re the only person sitting in the conference room, with 20 people on the phone.You’ll hear dogs barking in the background, babies crying. Yet all of these people have, in their heads, what theyneed for the meeting.It seems as if it was just a few years ago that we were taking people out of offices and putting them into cubicles.From there, the trend went to open work spaces, then hoteling, and then shared hoteling “cubes” ­­ all driven bythe need to keep real­estate costs low in a very acquisitions­oriented industry that’s always streamlining. Now,more and more of our employees are working remotely.In many ways, that’s a good thing. It gives people a lot more flexibility and freedom, and makes them happierabout the job because they’re able to put their lives together in ways that matter to them. This is true for men andwomen both. 1 think the additional flexibility makes Symantec more attractive to all employees and helps us getbetter people. I remember having discussions, eight or nine years ago, with my boss at the time about somebodywho was just the perfect candidate but didn’t want to move to our headquarters, in Mountain View, California. Theanswer was, “Nope, we need him here.” That is much less likely to happen today.But today’s more virtual workplace also raises interesting psychological questions. I think it makes all of us lessable to compartmentalize and separate the different elements of our lives as we used to. It’s less linear ­­ muchmore of a jumble ­­ because we’re always multitasking, we’re always on. The technology enables that by takingaway the limitations of time and space. I have seen people who stay up all night working with Europe, Australia,and India and then work the whole day in the United States. They burn themselves out because they’re alwaysavailable. It’s a huge worry.The new workplace also creates a very different ethos. Those 20 people in your phone meeting aren’t sittingaround a table together seeing the same presentation in front of them. The communal­experience piece of it ­­the camaraderie ­­ is lost. These are concerns for us. How do we ensure that people have the same kind ofexperience they used to get sitting in a room when they’re no longer even in the same hemisphere? We’ve gotvirtual teams all over the world, and I’m willing to bet there are many in which no team member has ever evenmet another team member. It’s really easy to turn everybody into a voice on the phone and a line on a screen,and we don’t want to do that.Similarly, how do we make sure people learn from one another in a virtualized workplace? How do we make surewe’re maintaining our company culture and values?A new wayThese are the kinds of questions we’ve grappled with as we implemented a home­based work program calledWays 2 Work, which we initially launched in parts of the United States and are now rolling out more broadly. Theprogram’s goal is to focus on employees’ contributions and results rather than when ­­ or where ­­ work is done.There’s a big technological component, of course: things like VoIP phones, social­networking tools, and othertechnologies can help people work efficiently from wherever they happen to be. But the program also reliesheavily on the ability of managers to make sure their colleagues stay connected to work in a human way. A goodexample of success is our sales support unit in Shannon, Ireland, where our managers and employees aresignificantly changing how they work (see sidebar, “Close­up: Shannon, Ireland”).Here in the United States, an important aspect of the program involves moving away from paid time off. Westarted about a year and a half ago at the top of the company and have been working our way down, expandingthe change to more and more groups. It’s a big jump.Basically, we’re saying, you don’t have a set amount of time off. Take your time off when you can ­­ we’re notgoing to record it but you need to get the job done.The program is certainly a positive for the company because it takes a lot of money off the balance sheet, but it’shad a really interesting effect on how people think of work time as well. I think it causes most people to look attime in the same way they did when they were students. Nobody cared if you studied five minutes or ten hours forthe quiz. All they cared about was that you did well on it. The new policy has been a challenge for someemployees, and we obviously have to beware of the extremes ­­ say, people watching soap operas all afternoon,at one end, and completely burning themselves out with overwork, at the other. But it’s been very successfuloverall, and I think our people appreciate the move. Our employee satisfaction scores did go up after the change,though I’m always leery of confusing correlation with causation when it comes to any single measure.What the program means for managersUltimately, our managers have a lot of discretion in how they implement home­based work programs and definehow work gets done in their own units. This is by necessity. Our products are so differentiated, and the types ofwork that our people do is so differentiated ­­ and dispersed ­­ that there can’t be a “one size fits all” solution. Wecan tell our people what we want and what the outcome has to be, but the businesses need to have theautonomy to get that result in their own way.This approach puts a lot of responsibility on our managers because it’s really up to them to help their peopledetermine the right balance. We spend a lot of time working with our managers on “remote management”:training them in a whole gamut of skills and techniques to help bring together people from different cultures as ateam. Those skills cover everything from the tactical, like clear and concise communication and follow­up skills, tothose more in the realm of management philosophy, like the ability to base the evaluation of an employee on thefulfilment of a set of measurable deliverables, as opposed to putting in a certain number of hours a week. Remotemanagement is now a core skill for managers ­­ one reflected in our performance­management processes.Yet even as these newer management skills grow in importance, I think it’s more challenging than ever to ensurethat our people have the general­management skills they need. In today’s more specialized work environment,you have to know a whole lot more about a whole lot less to do a good job. This is certainly true at Symantec,where, for example, inrecent years we’ve disaggregated all the various human­resources activities into specialistand generalist roles. Similarly, recruiting used to be handled by one or two people; now there might be ten peoplecontributing, but each of them handles specific tasks. I think that nearly all jobs are amenable to this trend, giventhe right talent and management skills.Developing solid general­management skills requires helping people to think hard about what they want the mapof their careers to look like. We also rotate people to give them more varied management opportunities. This isimportant because in a specialized world, people aren’t as likely to get general­management skills the way theyused to: by having responsibility for a whole bunch of things at once.A more virtual and disaggregated workplace puts a lot of pressure on our senior leadership to connect the dots.The act of redefining jobs in a global company, for example, tends to highlight some of the age­old frictions aboutregional versus corporate­level control ­­ and what you think about these issues often depends on where you sit.If you’re in the corporate office, the push is always for more consistency, but if you’re the head of Asia­Pacific,you’re saying, “Wait a minute, what about India? We can’t do it that way or we’ll lose people.” Talk of redefiningjobs has sparked some big debates and serves as a great reminder to us that we have to be able to see multiplepoints of view simultaneously.At the most basic level, working through these kinds of challenges comes down to building and strengtheningtrust. Ironically, perhaps, the act of building this kind of trust among senior managers is something I don’t think wecould have done virtually. There’s a limit to virtualization in that respect. At some point, you have to get peopletogether and sit around those tables and have those discussions. The meetings’ content is important, but just asimportant is physically connecting in one place now and then, so you can work things out with each other. At theend of the day, we’re still human beings.PHOTO (COLOR): Rebecca Ranninger is the executive vice president and chief human­resources officer at thesecurity software company Symantec, where she manages global personnel programs and policies.