Work today is different. It happens in different locations, different situations, and at different times. People also work through different arrangements — full and part-time employees, job-sharing, outsourced partners, contractors, freelancers, gig workers and more.
It gets complicated.
And it can add complexity for the individuals involved. That’s not good. People can feel overloaded, feel like they’ve lost control over their work. Productivity can suffer and the benefits of being an agile, flexible organization can be lost.
Citrix can help. However your work gets done, Citrix can reduce complexity and help your people be as productive as possible.
Some, like John Paul Construction, need the mobility and agility to quickly spin-up new users for resource-heavy BIM applications used on location at construction sites. Others, like Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, need their clinicians to have secure access to patient records while visiting homes, schools, and clinics.
Many organizations are taking the opportunity to completely redesign what “work” means.
Let’s look at some examples.
eBay Is Building the New Homeforce
“My job is to connect employees and contractors from around the world to their applications to get their job done in a secure manner, ensuring the best possible experience, regardless of the device that they’re using,” says eBay’s Dave Lesuer, Senior Manager, Office of the CIO.
Moving to Citrix Workspace gave eBay a hybrid environment from which it can securely deliver SaaS apps — like Office365 and Zoom — as well as its own legacy apps. It’s an environment designed for a new and agile workforce, a “homeforce,” as Lesuer says:
“What we’ve built is perfect for this kind of model; tapping into different markets for talent. If we need German language or Polish or Italian agents, they don’t have to be in a call-center, anymore. I don’t have to ship people laptops. I just send them a link [and] a document on how to get set up. Here’s a virtual desktop. You guys are good to go!
“… in Q4 I’m expecting to hit about 13,000 [connected users], so kudos to Citrix because I’m able to scale up quickly with just my existing staff of only 10 individuals that are also located around the world.”
You can learn more about eBay’s experience here and in the video below.
Capita Is Transforming the Future of Contact Centers
Capita, the UK’s largest business process outsourcing and professional services company, provides customer contact, support, and management services to government and well-known companies.
COVID-19 became a catalyst for Capita rethinking its contact center operations. When the pandemic arrived, the business didn’t have a homeworking solution for its 18,000 contact center advisors around the world.
IT Director Adrian Whitaker describes how, in just three days, it deployed a Citrix Workspace solution designed around the needs of people who were being asked to work from, perhaps, their kitchen tables for the first time:
“With Workspace, people just use a simple URL,” he says. “Citrix handles all the multi-factor authentication and determines whether the user needs to be directed to our on-premises solution or the Azure solution, depending on the client project. Everyone comes through the Citrix Cloud Connectors which gives us a secure, encrypted link into Capita. The agent logs on with their credentials — and is presented with the desktop (including all the client-specific apps) — that they use when they’re in the office. After that, it’s business as usual. The simplicity of the desktop experience was paramount in our decision to choose Workspace.”
Capita’s success is leading them to rethink the future of contact center operations, bring access to new pools of talent, reducing environmental impact, and real estate related costs.
“People have reflected on the art of the possible, things like digital transformation of customer journeys and virtual working have accelerated,” Whitaker says. “For multinational corporations, you can see the benefit of hybrid working models because less real estate will be required if people can work from home. There are huge benefits for the employee, too. They can avoid the cost and time of commuting. They can be flexible, working different hours, say, to cover travel-related support services during rush-hour periods. And, for single parents, the ability to work flexible hours from home enables them to take a job when they couldn’t before. … Strategically, choosing Workspace has enabled us to re-think the future of contact center operations to benefit our staff, our clients and Capita.”
Read Capita’s full customer story, here.
HDI Is Increasing Productivity, Improving Employee Experience
São Paulo, Brazil, is the largest city in South America. It boasts 20 million inhabitants and the world’s largest helicopter fleet. Why helicopters? Because road traffic is a nightmare that consumes three hours of the average employee’s work day.
For international insurance company HDI commute time was a productivity killer and the business wanted to improve its environment for an expanding work-from-home staff. HDI already had a Citrix VDI solution and decided to upgrade to Citrix Workspace service on Google Cloud Platform.
CTO Gilliard Delmiro explains: “For a company that is looking for a solution that remote employees can embrace, [Citrix] brings a lot of benefits. With Citrix, you don’t need to be concerned about the cryptography — using encryption keys or writing additional code isn’t necessary, because data and information is stored in the cloud.”
The introduction of Brazil’s General Data Protecion Law (LGPD) meant that HDI’s previous VPN solution was no longer appropriate. With Citrix however, the business could provide secure, single sign-on (SSO) access for all remote workers giving them a simple, seamless experience even on personal devices.
“The traffic congestion in São Paulo and the desire for more employees to work from home started the HDI Citrix journey and led to the company’s move away from VPNs. The coronavirus pandemic and overnight transition to work-from-home accelerated things. The requirements of LGPD loomed large. All of that brought HDI to Citrix Workspace for VPN-less access, and single sign-on for internally-deployed web applications and apps delivered as SaaS. The combination of VPN-less access and SSO helps drive productivity for remote users and it mitigates security risks. We believe our decision was a sound one. During the pandemic transition, we did not have any outages; we achieved 100 percent efficiency.”
HDI also uses Citrix Analytics for Performance and the microapps capability within Citrix Workspace to ensure the best possible experience for its staff. You can read the full story of HDI’s Citrix solution here.
As Delmiro says: “With Citrix, we have found a way to increase productivity and deliver a better employee experience. We’ve made remote working more secure. We’ve used analytics to provide better service to users. And with the intelligence in Citrix Workspace, we’ve cut through the noise in the modern work environment to enable employees to streamline workflows. Citrix Workspace will be an enabler. We’re on the road to improving productivity and employee satisfaction well into the future.”
Hollands Kroon Is Rethinking Work Itself
Dutch municipality Hollands Kroon has reimagined what work really means. Employees are empowered to choose their hours, there are no fixed holidays, and certainly no fixed office. Instead, the focus is on results and as a result, ICT Advisor Frank van Hoolwerff says, “Productivity is up, employee satisfaction is up, and all our citizen service commitments are met.”
Technology plays a critical role, of course, and Hollands Kroon chose Citrix Workspace to deliver a secure and unified employee experience for its staff.
Using Citrix, home-working employees are free to work from their device of choice, and their preferred operating system. Data security and compliance with government standards are a given, and Citrix Workspace’s microapps help deliver a streamlined workday for employees by organizing, guiding, and automating work in an intelligent and personal way, transforming the employee experience.
As van Hoolwerff says:
“We want employees that are self-starters, problem solvers and independent thinkers. Technology should not get in their way. If we are encouraging staff to work any hours they choose, we must create an environment that requires minimal support. This kind of model needs a clear, simple digital workplace. … We looked at other options, but nothing came close to the maturity and the features of the Citrix environment. This is more than a VDI solution. No other supplier could create an environment as rich as Citrix Workspace. It gives us custom gateways to secure applications, all kept in our environment.”
Learn more about Hollands Kroon’s dramatic transformation, here and in the video below.
Enabling New Work Models That Are Better for Your People and Your Business
Work is different. Changes that started over a decade ago have accelerated dramatically over the last 18 months. And the change is creating new opportunities. It’s opening up new pools of talent, it’s helping us be more green in the way we organize our operations, and it’s giving people more control over their work.
As Salesforce’s Brian Solis said in a recent Citrix interview, employee experience centers on how an employee feels while they are working.
Choosing the right technology is critical and Citrix can help. Citrix helps employers modernize their employee experience without compromising on security, helping individuals thrive in distributed work environments.
Read the full stories for each of these customers and be inspired.
Would you like to learn more about how customers are using Citrix? Check out our recent posts on green tech and sustainability and on cloud strategy.
