When the world shifted to remote work overnight, partners and IT leaders had to scramble to keep businesses functioning. Citrix Partners led the charge, helping to roll out remote work tools to help customers and their employees meet the challenge. Thank you, Citrix Partners! You were instrumental in keeping hundreds of thousands of employees connected while shifting to remote work!

The downside of this abrupt shift to remote work is that it magnified complexity, exposed bad process, and highlighted policy and program gaps. Unnecessary steps or inefficient processes that were tolerated when everyone was sitting next to each other in the office became barriers to efficiency.

Now, one year later, employee burnout is at an all-time high and is the No. 1 concern of most C-level execs.

In my recent interview with Wrike VP Aharon Weiner, he explained how critical face-to-face communication points get muddied when teams work remotely, and how Wrike restores collaboration and helps businesses clear up the digital chaos. But have CIOs caught on?

Extensive research compiled by Wrike shows that yes, they have. Twelve months after lockdowns began, almost half of IT leaders put remote work technology as a Top 3 priority for 2021, and 58 percent are investing in Collaborative Work Management (CWM).

I recently sat down, virtually, with Angela Sanfilippo, Head of Partner Engagement at Wrike, a Citrix company, who authored this research to chat a bit more about how Citrix + Wrike can help.

Welcome, Angela! It’s been a joy getting to know you and the amazing squad at Wrike over the last several months. I am beyond stoked to talk about how Citrix + Wrike can help make work simpler and help employees minimize complexity in their daily work. Tell us a little bit about your background. How did you come to the Wrike family?

For the last 20 years, I led marketing for start-ups, growth companies, and publicly traded companies. Over the years, one thing is clear: activating and engaging partners effectively is one of the greatest paths to customer success! My core expertise is in driving demand generation, customer awareness, and product marketing.

In my past, I ran partner marketing for an agency that managed partner programs for leading tech companies such as Symantec, Dell, HP, and CA. I used to run product marketing for Wrike but got the partnering bug as a marketer and moved into partner business development at Wrike a year ago and haven’t looked back. It’s been so exciting to see our solution evolve and scale dramatically in such a short period of time — moving from start-up to growing company, to being acquired by Citrix recently!

You interviewed over 300 IT executives and industry analysts. What did you learn about how CIOs coped with the rapid transition to remote work?

If you want to understand what’s emerging as top of mind for CIOs post-pandemic, it’s important to look at where they were in early 2020. The majority were focused on rolling out company-wide tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams for the first time. Some major firms went from 200 end users to 15,000 overnight — no small feat.

But while these tools filled a gap in the short-term, rollout was unstructured. Employees often lacked the necessary capabilities and guidelines to successfully plan, organize, collaborate on and execute remote work. They had too many tools, or each team had their own likes and dislikes, and trying to find the best product to make everyone happy was virtually impossible. Instead of finding one solution that solves all these problems, leaders often implemented redundant or multiple tools.

What’s been the impact on employees?

Not surprisingly, CIOs are seeing their workforce hit a wall, with 37 percent of employees saying they’ve been working harder than ever before, and 33 percent admitting they’ve experienced greater levels of anxiety and depression. Over half of CIOs are reporting that their people are completely burnt out or not engaged or struggling to produce as well as they used to.

As we know, remote work isn’t going away. CIOs now find themselves actively looking for technology that can play nicely with existing tools and allow people to work the way they want to — while increasing collaboration and communication under a unifying set of norms.

That’s where it gets exciting. Collaborative Work Management (CWM) has emerged as a top CIO priority for 2021, right alongside things like security, cloud, and digital transformation.

For those that are new to CWM, what are the top features partners should position to CIOs?

A few CIO buzzwords that come to mind are security, visibility, and standardization. Nearly half of IT executives we surveyed want more secure collaboration, 45 percent want greater visibility into who is doing what across the organization, and 46 percent are looking for seamless external collaboration.

Wrike solves for all of these while easing the four pain points that lead to employee burnout:

  • Confusion. Wrike helps employees understand how to use tools through standardization and structured processes.
  • Redundancy. Wrike’s single digital workspace allows everyone to communicate and collaborate in the same space with defined workflows and a centralized system of record.
  • Chokepoints. Greater alignment means increased agility and faster responses to challenges.
  • Different workstyles. Automated workflows and integrations play well with tools workers already have — all while keeping teams connected across the organization.

I will continue my discussion with Angela in our next installment, where we will dive deeper into the top CWM use cases IT leaders want to improve, how Wrike benefits each department, as well as exciting new integrations with Microsoft Teams.

Partners, here are three steps you can take right now:

Thank you for your partnership! If you have feedback or questions, please drop them in the comments below.