Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York City, you're Inside The ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSC an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSC and at ICE for exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
If you're someone who listens to a podcast from the New York Stock Exchange, I'll put money on the fact that you're also probably a person who's devoted a good deal of screen time these past few months attending meetings or events virtually from home using Zoom, Skype, WebEx, or other video platforms. It's just another part of the phrase we've heard a lot since March, the new normal. And part of the new normal for the NYSC is our Digital Leader series. And today we're sharing the inaugural conversation with our ICE House listeners, our Digital Leader series convenes the CEOs and other top folks from NYSC-listed tech companies to share how their organizations are tweaking their business models and serving their customers in new ways having adjusted to the reality we're all living in amid the coronavirus pandemic. The series is recorded before an assembled audience from all over the globe of C level executives representing dozens of public and private companies making bold moves to transform their companies, cultures, and physical workspaces to adapt to a hybrid future of working at the office and from home.
Josh King:
Our first event featured a panel we called The Future of Work. It include the CEOs of three leading NYSC-listed tech companies, Box, PagerDuty, and Slack. Box, run by Aaron Levie, held its IPO back in 2015. And PagerDuty, run by Jennifer Tejada and Slack run by Stewart Butterfield went public last year. PagerDuty through the root of the traditional IPO and Slack used our unique direct floor listing.
Josh King:
Introduced by NYSE president Stacy Cunningham and led in dialogue by my colleague, Betty Liu, Aaron, Jennifer, and Stewart talked about how their companies have pivoted to a fully remote environment prepared for a future of decentralized operations and are looking strategically to use this anticipated disruption of the status quo to create a more inclusive workforce moving forward. The next voice you'll hear will be Stacy's who'll offer a proper introduction of Aaron, Jennifer, and Stewart followed by their conversation with Betty. That's all right after this.
Speaker 3:
And now a word on ICE's ETF hub.
Speaker 1:
Across global markets, ETFs are flourishing and ETF assets now top $5.5 trillion, yet a variety of protocols and lack of standardization mean the time is right to help fuel further growth. Now new advancements can help simplify the process. We're working with the industry to create a centralized hub that connects participants and brings efficiencies to the primary market. ICE ETF hub's unified standards and protocols supports order entry across equity and fixed income ETFs. For fixed income, the speed of custom basket facilitations will increase with both parties using APIs, UI, and chat to assemble a mutually beneficial basket. Market efficiency will be enhanced by improved transparency, helping to boost the number of creation and redemption baskets assembled and underlying bonds traded. ICE's ETF hub brings new efficiencies to the primary trading process, fueling ongoing growth participation and market modernization.
Stacey Cunningham:
Good afternoon. Thanks so much. And I'm excited to welcome everyone to the New York Stock Exchanges Digital Leader series. While we would have loved to host this event in person, it seems pretty fitting to me that given our guest speakers and the topic and the way that they're powering the transition to remote work, it feels really fitting to do it virtually. The shift to remote work has happened so much more rapidly than I think any of us would've expected. Just three months ago, I was out traveling at a conference and had no issues with getting on a plane and coming back. And within three weeks from then, all of a sudden, it seemed as if the vast majority of people across the U.S. were working from home. And that was so rapid that it actually accelerated what I think is a digital transformation that would've happened otherwise, but is happening much more quickly now.
Stacey Cunningham:
And it's because of the technology leaders that we have that are supporting those efforts and all the tools that they're giving us to be able to facilitate that digital transformation. And as I've said to many of them before, it feels as if we've saved ourselves lots of hours of debate as we look to where we're going. So the three speakers we have today that I'm really excited to welcome here, they rose to the task of getting the entire United States and beyond up and running globally. And we are excited about the digitalization and its lasting impacts it's going to have on the efficiency of businesses going forward. So I'm going to turn over to NYSC executive chairman and chief experience officer Betty Liu to kick off today's discussion. So thank you all. And thank you, Betty.
Betty Liu:
Thank you so much, Stacy. And as you mentioned, it is so great to have, well, first of all, to kick off our Digital Leaders series, but then to have three of our biggest digital leaders from the NYSE joining us today and making the time. Really, really so exciting that we're going to have you for the next hour. I have so many questions and I'm sure our audience has so many questions for you. Stacy's going to be staying with us throughout as well. So we're not going to lose you, Stacy, there. But I want to introduce our three panelists, who really need no introduction, but I'll just go through it quickly. We've got Jennifer Tejada, the CEO of PagerDuty, Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box. So, thank you so much to the three of you.
Betty Liu:
Let me kick it off with Aaron, your company, along with Stewart and Jennifer's really have been helping companies go online, work remote, continue to operate throughout this pandemic. As we're seeing this country go through reopening, taking steps toward that, what is keeping you up at night these days, Aaron, beside your little ones.
Aaron Levie:
Yeah, thank you. I think I speak for Stewart and Jen and probably lot of other people. Thank you to Betty and Stacy and the broader team. You folks are keeping the world economy humming. So obviously really, really important how you all have dealt with this significant level of leadership through this event. So we're just the mere technology players trying to help people share data and be able to collaborate, but you're keeping some very important systems running. So we appreciate that. We're all dealing with, I think the same thing as any other organization, which is this abrupt shift to remote work and what does that mean for how the future of work is going to look.
Aaron Levie:
At Box, super focused on making sure that we can keep our customers secure and able to collaborate seamlessly, and be able to move more of their information to the cloud and in partnership with products like Slack and PagerDuty and others make sure that we can build out a modern ecosystem of technology that helps companies run in a very efficient and digital first way.
Aaron Levie:
So, what keeps us up is really thinking about what this future looks like and I know that we're going to get into a lot of conversation around that, but really thinking about what happens in this new normal, as we have more phase re-entry and reopening of offices and business in the physical sense. What does this future of work look like when we operate in a digital first way of working and we think that there's going to be a lot of exciting opportunities for companies to reimagine their business processes, their workplaces, their cultures, even though there's going to be certainly a lot of disruption in the process that companies are going to have to work through, but that's what we're spending all of our time thinking about.
Betty Liu:
Jen, how about you?
Jennifer Tejada:
Thank you for asking the question. I think what's keeping me up at night is the responsibility I have as a leader around the duty of care for all of our stakeholders. Aaron, I think you articulated really well ensuring the success of our customers, knowing that many of them are on different places on the continuum, in terms of how they've made the transition to remote work. It's been such an unprecedented time. I don't have a better word than unprecedented. But if you look at the backdrop of COVID and the fact that we're undergoing a virus that we don't have a vaccine for, the economic backdrop behind that, which has been quite volatile. And then you add into that the recent civil unrest that we've all experienced.
Jennifer Tejada:
As a leader, in addition to trying to run a successful business and look after your customers, we're looking after the wellbeing of our employees who increasingly look to their employer for information and for guidance. We're looking after the mental health of our employees, making sure that not only are they productive, but they are well as they deal with a different kind of stress than maybe they have in the past. And increasingly, we're standing up for equality and really trying to stand behind the black community, given some of the challenges that we face as a society. So it's a full, full full-time job. And I don't know about losing sleep. I don't know that many of us are getting that much sleep.
Betty Liu:
And Stewart.
Stewart Butterfield:
Well, I think Aaron really well articulated the perspective we have on customers and what's causing us to lose sleep there and Jen in the larger world. So I'll take a third option, which is just a degree of uncertainty. So we have a lot of decisions that we have to make now. Should we take our... I don't know how many open recs we have, but hundreds of them, they all say where it says Toronto or New York or San Francisco, San Francisco, or remote, should we for the benefit of employees who have already decided that at some point they want to move back closer to family, or they want to move somewhere closer to nature or whatever, that we're going to offer them that option.
Stewart Butterfield:
And the list of areas where we just can't know the answer is getting longer and longer, and I think more and more important, and they include things like, what is the macro environment going to look like 3, 6, 9 months from now? Because I think that this is very unusual recession. Some sectors hit incredibly hard, some unaffected, some actually benefiting, but with this number of unemployed people, I think that the trickle down impact is going to be big. Is COVID coming back hard? And even if it does, are we just going to reconcile ourselves to a couple thousand deaths a day and pursue that as normal? Is business travel coming back? Can we really navigate the difficulty of a hybrid distributed workforce? And then people working in offices, what should our offices look like? We have a bunch of buildouts on hold.
Stewart Butterfield:
So it's always that's the job. But I think that the number of axes on which we have this uncertainty, including with customers, including with employees, including with the civil unrests is it's an interesting time to be a leader.
Betty Liu:
Absolutely interesting. And dealing all three of you, but many leaders dealing with things that you never thought certainly would never think top of mind that you'd be dealing with at this moment. Stewart, I'll continue with you on this question. We kept hearing over and over again from companies how incredibly easy it seemed and flawless for many companies to switch to remote work. And I'm kind of curious if that was a secret the three of you knew already that companies could switch to remote work pretty easily, and why we didn't do that earlier. And I'm kind of curious, Stewart, your take on that, being that your product is so conducive to remote work. Did you know this?
Stewart Butterfield:
No, I don't want to speak for Jen or Aaron, but I'll say for myself, I'm one of the 99% probably who, if you asked me in February, could you just switch the whole company to working remote inside of a week? I would've said definitely not impossible. And sometimes when something is a requirement, it ceases to be impossible and you just do it. There are more unknowns there though. And I think the one that's most concerning to me is to what extent we're burning down the social capital that we've accumulated over the last couple years, the relationships between people, the kind of the goodwill, the culture. And are we going to find ourselves in a position as an increasing percentage of the employee base are made up of people who started at this where during the recruiting process, they didn't meet anyone. They didn't have the week at headquarters to kind of kick off their onboarding. Is it going to be harder to maintain those weak social ties that really cause a lot of cohesion across functional groups and cause a lot of the serendipitous conversations?
Stewart Butterfield:
So I think that's another factor in the unknown. I would say that there's definitely stuff that, or maybe this goes without saying, but actually probably doesn't, this is not normal working from home stress with the pandemic or child care. Like everyone, I'm not going to recite the whole list because I think we all know it. But there's a lot of things that we're doing in an exaggerated way. We were a happy customer of Zoom before any of this and a happy customer of Zoom through this and our usage is probably 3X. And I think in a hypothetical world where we largely return to offices, I would expect our usage to slide.
Stewart Butterfield:
And again, so the happy customers. But there's some that are kind of one directional or unidirectional shifts or one way doors or depending on how you want to think about it. And I think historically, organizations that adopt Slack just don't stop using it. So I think that is probably something that if organizations pick it up at this time, they're going to keep it. And Aaron mentioned a whole list of things earlier. Almost all of those are one way doors. I mean, advancing down a timeline as opposed to a temporary exaggeration of the normal standard. I'll pause there. Because I wanted to make sure that everyone has a chance.
Betty Liu:
Yeah, Jen, I want to get your take on that too. I think some people see it as an either or situation, but it isn't. There is obviously people are returning to work. There's some jobs you have to do where you're face to face with people. But I'm curious if this is making you rethink a little bit about your... Obviously, and you mentioned that earlier about your work environment and also just how are you working with clients where you may have thought before face to face is most important, but now we're all kind of rethinking that a little bit.
Jennifer Tejada:
I think we're rethinking a lot of things. Before this happened, we had already made a decision as a company to shift to more remote workers. We historically had been an in-office organization, like a hundred percent co-located so to speak. And prior to COVID, we were 20% remote. And the challenges, the remote experience in that scenario is different from the in-office experience and you're trying to find ways to bridge them. Like going remote a hundred percent because of the virus. Being remote 20% was also out of necessity because the talent market was so well contested and we wanted the best talent wherever we could find it. And it wasn't always the case that we could access people in the cities where we had offices.
Jennifer Tejada:
The challenge going forward is how does that hybrid model work? Because productivity is so personal. Like some of our employees are more productive than ever at home. They're in living situations where they have space where they can work and think, and their kids may be of an age, or they may not have kids that are disruptive that they have to look after during the day. But then we have young employees where, when you're right out of university or you're in your first job, your workplace is your social center. And that is where you come to engage with others and build a circle of support and friendships and that's not happening. And that can be very isolating.
Jennifer Tejada:
In my first job at Proctor & Gamble, I was a remote worker. And I remember that feeling of isolation, even though I was talking to people all day long and engaging with people by phone or out in the field, not having that core hub to come back to and just seeing people and engaging with people socially was hard over time. So there were a lot of programs in place to ensure that happened.
Jennifer Tejada:
And I think we have to look at the social nature, the whole person and what the person needs. And it really is going to require us to look at our employees and our customers on a case by case basis. I have some customers where my relationship has improved as a result of this, because we're doing one on one videos, we're getting on the phone, we're engaging more frequently, we're more succinct, the meetings are always on time. There's no getting stuck in the airport. There's just an increased amount of productivity. I have other customers where they're not used to this environment. They're overwhelmed with the transition in their own workforce. Some of our customers who have manufacturing environments or have like serious complications with being a hundred percent remote in terms of delivering their business continuity, it's very different.
Jennifer Tejada:
And so there's not... The only thing I am certain of is there isn't going to be a one size fits all answer. And so every construct of the way we work is going to have to be considered from our policies and our code of conduct to how we think about productivity and how we define productivity, and how we continue to develop our culture in an environment that will indeed be hybrid, how we serve our customers. It's all going to be different.
Betty Liu:
And Aaron, I see a lot of nodding from you on what Jen is saying.
Aaron Levie:
No, I mean, everything Jen just said, we totally are subscribed to it. And same with Stewart, I think it's not going to be one size fits all. Right now, if you surveyed, if we did a survey right now of anybody listening in, I think it's a wide range of organizations. And we said, predict the percentage of employees that will be working from home in six months and 18 months out from now. I think we would see a pretty even uniform histogram of results. And it's because every organization is different depending on the size of the organization, the industry that you're in.
Aaron Levie:
And so the simplest thing that we think about at Box, and I think we're all collectively thinking about is, is because you can't predict that, because we can't predict do offices go back 90% capacity, 100% capacity, 40% capacity. The easiest thing to do is to think what is better when it's digital. And that's an easy framework to kind of live by, which is like, what gets better when it's virtual or digital, and no matter what those things are probably not going back as Stewart mentioned, these sort of one way doors.
Aaron Levie:
So, the things that are better digitally are, if you can have a conference that brings together 20,000 of your customers, instead of the 1000 maybe that could have physically come to your event, well, that's better digitally because now I can reach more customers. If I can have a project within our organization that brings together a hundred different engineers that all work in different teams, in different departments, or on a Slack channel, that's way better than the eight people that happen to be able to fit inside of a conference room previously to go and work on that.
Aaron Levie:
And so, these are the things that I don't think we go back from, because we've seen in this amazing experiment what happens when you can work in this new way with sort of a digital workplace at the center, no matter whether or not you have 20% or 50% or 100% of people go back to offices, that this is going to be a better way of working. So we're optimistic. I'm optimistic that because businesses are always going to be focused on what delivers the best results for their organization, each organization will find its own path to what the right sort of equilibrium is of work from home work, from anywhere, work inside of an office, but digital is going to be accelerated no matter what. And I think there's a lot more that we're not going to revert from going forward than the things that we do actually ultimately where those things go back to normal.
Aaron Levie:
So I think we have more change ahead of us as opposed to reversion back to where things were before March. And we're optimistic that much of that change is going to be positive. It's going to bring together more talent pools. It's going to let companies better serve their customers. It's going to be able to let you reach more of your clients and in a way that wouldn't have been possible previously. And I think we're all seeing pretty exciting, new, surprising use cases. The amount of yoga classes and gym courses and online cooking courses that people are taking, that you never would've ever ventured out to go and do those activities previously, we're seeing all new ways that our society is going to evolve and I think some exciting ways because of this event.
Aaron Levie:
But of course, that only matters, and we can only get through it if we solve the health crisis and the economy itself and jobs are taken care of. So, that obviously remains at the forefront of, I think, what we're all thinking about and worried about.
Betty Liu:
Let me just tackle some of these questions, because we're getting quite a few now from the audience. This first one coming in from someone you all know Elena Gomez from Zendesk, asking a few questions here. Jen, maybe I have you tackle this first one. Is there a company you guys look to as a model of doing work from home well, who is the showcase company? Has there been one, Jen, that you've looked at and modeled after?
Jennifer Tejada:
Yeah, I haven't found anybody who has perfected this at scale. So there are a number of late stage startups that are 100% remote by design, like GitLab or Zapier, many of them have open source, some of their remote working practices, which has been super helpful to us. It remains to be seen whether you can scale a 100% remote company because the experiment that we're living in right now is time limited. Like when everybody's remote, it's one thing, but they're already many of my customers that have returned to work 25% or returned to work in Asia on a shift-based basis, et cetera.
Jennifer Tejada:
And so we're not going to be in this situation where everybody is in the same situation and that empathy and that collaboration is happening naturally. We are absolutely moving to a hybrid world. And I think Aaron said it very well when he said, if something works better digitally, then you continue to follow that path.
Jennifer Tejada:
I think the smartest companies are the ones that are instead of saying, how do I do what I used to do in a physical world? Well, virtually they're saying, what can I do now as a result of being digital that's different and better. And we tend to look at examples like that. And Elena is on my board. She's our audit chair. So I love seeing her here today, but we're also doing a lot of sharing and reapplying across leadership.
Jennifer Tejada:
So Stewart and Aaron and I have been business partners for a long time, but we're talking to each other on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Just throwing out a hard question, some of the uncertainties that Stewart talked about a lot around, what do we have to try and anticipate for? How do we plan? Because you don't want to dig yourself a deep trench going down one path and then the world changes in two weeks and that was a waste of time. So we're constantly working together to try and evolve I think the industry on behalf of our customers and our employees. And I don't think anybody has the right answer because of how fast it's all evolving.
Betty Liu:
Aaron, I'll ask you this other question from Elena. How do you think enterprise selling is going to change?
Aaron Levie:
Jen, let me know if I'm answering wrong for any board related reasons. I think as Jen mentioned we have it in our head that somehow this in-person interaction is a better customer experience and that's what we've all been used to. And frankly, it wouldn't have been possible to do it differently before two or three or five years ago. I mean, before we all had better bandwidth and you had built-in video cameras and you had products like Zoom and WebEx and others, that it would not have been possible to do the experiment that we're running right now. But we have it in this mindset that you have to go to your customers site, you have to travel to meet them. That's the professional, respectful thing to do.
Aaron Levie:
And it absolutely is, all that is true. The interesting thing though is when you're doing that for that one customer, by definition, you're not doing it for all the other customers that you could have interacted with that day. And because you're on an airplane, because you're having to travel to a different country and you're taking up the dozens of other hours that go into that type of business trip. And so the question is on the whole, can you actually be a more customer centric organization by moving more to virtual communications because you can better reach more of your customers on a much more frequent and continuous basis. And that I think is a while it's framed as a little bit of a rhetorical question, I think the answer's pretty straightforward. If I could interact with three or five customers a day and still do all the other business meetings that I have to get done, is that way better for our customers than the one or two meetings a week.
Aaron Levie:
Maybe previously would've done in an in-person context. And that's I think what we're all experiencing is actually we can be more customer-centric. We can get our customers together much more frequently. We can get more feedback on what we could be doing better. We've run multiple advisory board sessions in the past few weeks, and it's vastly easier by like a factor of 20 to get 20 or 30 customers onto a video call, have them all share feedback, learn from them about what we can to be doing better. And then we disband and we go back to our day and go work on what we heard. That's the kind of meeting that would normally take three months to plan and you would only have a small percentage of people who would be able to actually go and attend.
Aaron Levie:
So I think you can actually build a much more customer-centric organization as you move more to virtual. And that doesn't mean that the in-person goes away, that will compliment the virtual, but I think we have to flip it instead of thinking in person first and then virtualize the backup, what happens when you think about virtual first and when appropriate and when convenient, you can also do the in-person interaction. That's more of the shift that I would certainly like to see.
Betty Liu:
Great points. Stewart, I'll ask you another question. Outside of the tech industry, which is in many companies announcing as we've been all talking about this commitment to work from home, what have you heard in other industries? Are there some that are more receptive to transitioning to work from home remote for the long term than others?
Stewart Butterfield:
Financial services so far, and that's my perception, a couple of customers who I don't want to speak for publicly, I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure Morgan Stanley made a public announcement and they are the second biggest or anyway top three lesser of real estate in Manhattan. And obviously, there's a whole series of knock-on effects from that. I know that there are a lot of people who are still determined and believe they're going to go more or less back to normal. The interesting thing here is the game theory about no one gets to make this decision by themselves, we're all part of a number of different markets. And what everyone else decides to do is going to have a big impact on what we decide to do. Imagine I say, I don't like this remote work thing. As soon as we are able to, we're going back to the offices, we're going to expect to require employees to work from offices. We're only going to hire in our offices.
Stewart Butterfield:
Now, and in this example, everyone else goes the other way. Everyone else offers flexibility. You can do the commute twice a week, stay home the other three days, or you can move completely out to a different market. We're screwed in this scenario, like in this quadrant of the game theory choices, because first of all, everyone else is going to be competing for talent in a much, much larger pool than we are. So that's one disadvantage.
Stewart Butterfield:
And I think even in the markets where we do compete for talent, we're going to preclude those people who want the optionality or want the flexibility in the future. And then third, our existing employees who have decided through this period that I need to move closer to family, or I want to move to some place where I can see a lake or something like that, we'll lose them if we don't offer that functionality. So the same thing is true about, like did enterprise sales people have to fly to the city and go to the office because that was just the cultural expectation. There's no person pulling the strings and making that as a decision.
Stewart Butterfield:
If that expectation returns, our sales people will be traveling again. If that expectation doesn't return, it won't. And what everyone decides makes a big difference here because I think all of us, probably everyone listening to this right now has benefited to a certain extent from this environment where that we don't have to travel. So that's an enormous unlock of time.
Stewart Butterfield:
I think probably for everyone, there's certain things they miss about being in the office and meeting people face to face. And so there's some disadvantages. What each of us does or each of our preferences, I guess, as executives, as leaders is going to have a big influence on what everyone else does. So I don't want to always say that there's a lot of uncertainty to be my answer for things, but I would say it's not always up to the leaders of these companies to decide whether they're going to be all remote or all back in the office, or at least the ones who have decided at this point that they're going to be back in the office because they have to compete in the marketplace, and they have to meet their customers where their customers want to be met.
Stewart Butterfield:
And I, as a customer, I think would prefer to have three back to back meetings for half an hour, rather than this elaborate setup where I'm traveling or you're traveling, and there's just like a lot of form around it. So yeah, I'll leave it there, but that's I think been most interesting for me to kind of play out, what is everyone else going to do?
Aaron Levie:
I have a solution to Stewart's game theory problem. So maybe Betty and Stacy, you could make it a mandate as an NYSE-listed company, you have to take all business meetings virtually, and then we will instantly solve the network of that problem that would normally exist.
Betty Liu:
I'll leave that up to Stacey to make the call on. Aaron, this is a specific question for you, from someone who knows you, Shamim Mohammad from CarMax. Shamim, I hope I didn't bungle your name, but he says, "Hi, Aaron, good to see you. When we met in December, we were discussing talent shortage." So very much in line with what Stewart was just discussing. "Post-COVID, does it make it easier or tougher to attract, retain, and develop talent?" And as Stewart was just mentioning, talent now has more options to work for anyone. So what are your thoughts on this?
Aaron Levie:
Yeah. Awesome. And hey, Shamim, and hope all is well on your end and the family is healthy and safe right now. So I think kind of like Stewart was talking about, it's this just new vector that we could never have planned for when we think about talent, where all of a sudden, if you move to this virtual environment where more of our work is done virtually, a whole new set of opportunities and possibilities open up. So first of all, there's no geographic boundary of where your talent can work from. And if you think about how somewhat arbitrary it is that the world's sort of hubs of technology talent from a software startup standpoint happened to be in Silicon Valley or New York or Austin or Boston or Toronto.
Aaron Levie:
That's 20, 30, 40 years of a whole bunch of events that happened that created these hubs and ecosystems. But that's missing the fact that amazing digital talent might exist anywhere around the world. So the irony of the digital companies and companies delivering IT infrastructure to the world, and yet they're physically limited by where they can bring together talent and move their businesses forward, that obviously makes no sense.
Aaron Levie:
And so I think this is an environment where we can actually all collectively, whether it's an internal IT organization or a software startup, we can start to bring talent together from quite literally anywhere in the world. And it does change what you have to do to retain employees. It changes how you do culture and engagement. I think the fundamentals of your organization's culture shouldn't change in this environment. They get amplified in a lot of respects around a culture of collaboration or transparency or moving quickly, but you cultivate it differently. You have different types of conversations and interaction models when you're virtual or when you have a digital first organization.
Aaron Levie:
But I think ultimately, it gives more choice to employees. It probably creates a better environment for those that have other circumstances they have to deal with. Maybe they have to go home early. Maybe they have to come into office late. Maybe they need to move to a different location to be able to be with family. So I think we can have the ability to actually be better in supportive talent, better in supportive of broader inclusion of more communities in the digital economy. So I'm optimistic on that, but again, kind of Stewart's point, it's not going to come completely for free and easily, it's going to take work. There's some uncertainty that we have to work through, but I do think it is going to be a net positive for the talent environment and for organizations to be able to amplify their cultures and ultimately hopefully build more inclusive organizations. But again, that won't be simple, but it will be more possible now, which is I think exciting.
Betty Liu:
What are the specific next steps you're taking at your company now to determine increasing your percentage of remote work? What specifically are your next steps?
Jennifer Tejada:
Sure. I mean, it starts with learning and really understanding where the employee base is at and where our customers are at. So we've been doing frequent like every other week pulse surveys on how our employees are feeling and how productive they feel like they are, how connected they feel they are to the mission where they need help. And so really starting to surgically understand which teams perform really well in a remote environment and which teams need to be in a co-located environment, what tools managers need in order to be effective managing a remote or a hybrid workforce for that matter. And likewise, where are their traps or challenges. So that's been part of it.
Jennifer Tejada:
We're thinking about office space going forward in more of a hub mentality, as opposed to a permanent residence for workers, because we think a lot of people will see offices in the future as a place that you might stop in for a specific physical engagement, but then go back to doing your work remotely.
Jennifer Tejada:
We're already pretty well tooled for remote working organization. And I think that's why the transition to being 100% remote was pretty seamless for us, but for companies who aren't, I think you really have to look at your cloud strategy and your collaboration strategy, and even the way you communicate as a company. So making sure the employees understand which communication platform we use for immediate urgent needs, which communication platforms do you use for collaborative work and what kind of communication platforms you use for storage or long cycle work, and how do you manage all of those things?
Jennifer Tejada:
I think security is really important thinking about your security stance and how you support the propagation of endpoints as people are remote. We have a zero trust security stance, meaning we don't trust any particular device or person, which has enabled us again to sort of make that transition seamlessly, but also really training your employees to be vigilant because the bad actors are leveraging this opportunity in a meaningful way right now. So phishing attacks are up significantly and employees need to be wide-eyed and well aware of those vulnerabilities. So I think that's important.
Jennifer Tejada:
And then the last thing I would say is just to double down on Aaron's comment around culture. You don't change your culture as a result of remote work, you build on it. And culture should be the foundation that you leverage to engage your employees when you can't be with them physically.
Betty Liu:
Aaron, there's a lot of CTOs that are attending this webinar, CTOs and CIOs. Staying on the talent question or topic, how is that role going to evolve and change?
Aaron Levie:
Personally, I think this is one of the most exciting times ever to be a CTO or a CIO. The amount of, first of all, what we've heard from our customers, and I know that many on the line feel the same way. Every company, their ability to thrive, survive and transform right now has come down to the critical decisions that their CIO or CTO has made with their team over the past couple of years. And we're seeing so much more love for and accolades for the technology organization in companies because so many have been set up to be able to respond so quickly and so smoothly to this remote work and digital work environment.
Aaron Levie:
So I think CIOs and CTOs and their broader organizations are going to be the core dependency, the decisions you make in architecture, the decisions you make in what platforms you choose, this will determine how your company is able to respond, the culture that gets created, the workplace of the future that gets enabled, the business processes and customer experiences that ultimately are manifested.
Aaron Levie:
So, I think it's a great time to be a CIO. I think it's a great time to be a CTO. I think it's a great time to be really thinking through what the future of technology is. For an organization, you have the benefit of hundreds of companies like PagerDuty, Slack, Zoom, Box, and others that are all working on your behalf to try and help accelerate your digital transformation. And it's really going to come down to the critical choices and the judgment calls you make of how to set your organization up for this future of work with, again, a broad ecosystem of partners that are innovating as rapidly as ever to support those decisions and to support that architecture. So I think it's a very exciting time.
Betty Liu:
It is exciting time for CTO, CIOs and for innovation in general. And Stewart, there's a question specifically for you. The question again comes from someone whose name does not appear, but I think the benefits of using Slack for work from home in email replacement and communication are clear. Could you talk about new use cases of Slack, specifically in a tech and developer community, since they often drive new use cases and innovation?
Stewart Butterfield:
We had 110,000 customers before this stretch. So obviously when people were mostly working in offices, they were happy, thought Slack was a less positive impact. And I think that will continue after. So this isn't specific to working from home. Although I do think that everyone is experimenting. Everyone is trying new tools. Everyone is trying new techniques. We're actually very likely to pull one of our best execs and just put them on how do we need to change the way we work so that we have some people really focused on that and everything from meetings to documentation, to sales, enablement, new hire onboarding, like there's so much.
Stewart Butterfield:
So I guess maybe I would point out two things. One is it's very easy for engineers and developers to configure all of the integrations in Slack so that their PagerDuty is integrated with Slack and alerts monitoring happens in a channel. Their continuous integration testing tools are doing the reports there. It's less obvious that they would be beneficial and it's less obvious how you would do it to integrate marketing automation tools or CRM or finance, support ticketing for customers, call centers.
Stewart Butterfield:
So I think the ability to do those integrations, and to be clear in a very lightweight way, and no one's going to use Box in Slack in any real sense, but the integration is very valuable because first of all, it might be compliance requirements. But second of all, I can see the preview and we can have this discussion and pull in the content. So that's one is, is a greater of integrations and ideally kind of self-serve DIY integrations that are created by people in those functional areas.
Stewart Butterfield:
The second one is shared channels. So you're seeing an enormous amount of activity. And as more people start to use them, it's starting to grow faster, which is obviously very exciting. But Jen, Aaron and I are in a shared channel with a bunch of other execs. And there's really like that could have been a WhatsApp group. It could have been a text thread. It could have been an email list. And all of those would've been way worse for what we actually got. And the advantage of kind of getting the benefits of channels. So improving the degree of collaboration while simultaneously increasing the degree of security by bringing communication that was happening out of band into your primary system, where you have DLP and e-discovery, and all of that stuff is a big win. I think we'll see more and more of that. So people supporting their customers with shared channels, people working with their creative agencies outside council, everyone, every partner they work with outside.
Betty Liu:
Giving me some ideas on... There's certainly some new ideas on how to use Slack. I think also people look to Slack and other tools like yours to measure team product activity as well. So still with you on this next question from Rajiv Ramaswami from VMware, how are you measuring team productivity, Stewart?
Stewart Butterfield:
Like this? So that was a gesture of looking at my finger and seeing which way the wind is blowing. There's a high degree of guess work because, historically, at least for developer productivity, it's notoriously hard to measure and all of the measures kind of introduce behaviors that you don't want and kind of ultimately reduce productivity. So if you count the number of lines of code written has a predictable impact. If you count the number of bugs fixed, suddenly every bit of developmental work has this overhead of wrapping it up with filing a bug and then closing it.
Stewart Butterfield:
Here's one thing I had a conversation with Lori Beer, the CIO of JP Morgan. This is several years ago. I had never met her before. And this topic came up and something that occurred to us was probably the best measure of engineering or developer productivity is employee engagement because engineers hate feeling ineffective.
Stewart Butterfield:
The things that cause you to be unproductive or ineffective are typically bad process, bad coordination, poor planning, a lack of clear decision making, a lack of accountability, so all the things you would want to get rid of. Whereas when engineers are shipping code, a common saying in the industry, nothing beats shipping or nothing feels as good as shipping or shipping cures all the problems. And so people are happy when they're shipping. So like one of the ways you can tell how productive engineers is look at it. I mean, there's obviously, and with sales people, with recruiters, with support teams, there's more objective ways of measuring that productivity. But I think that engagement one, it's very tightly correlated. And there's other reasons that people can be unhappy, but I don't think there's any such thing as an engineer who's really happy about their work at company X and is not productive and is being held back, is not being able to execute their craft.
Stewart Butterfield:
It is a fascinating question though, and I think one that there's going to be a little bit of a reckoning. I can see Aaron wants to break in, and I will give you that opportunity, but a little bit of a reckoning for people who have too much of a command and control, too much of a like the same attitude that they would have if they were supervising people in a fast food restaurant, the time card checking, want to make sure you are working all the time. That's just not going to work for knowledge workers. Like, first of all, it's ineffective and it's a waste of time, but I think people will grow to resent it. And that means that those other measures of productivity will be increasingly important.
Betty Liu:
Aaron, it sounded like you wanted to jump in.
Aaron Levie:
I liked all of these topics, so I prefer to jump in on every topic, but then we should hand it over to Jen, because we've taken over the past few. But I think just the only thing I would throw out there to Stewart's point is I think what we've discovered in this remote work environment is actually all the things that kind of would creep into the business in again, the pre-March environment where it wasn't producing the ultimate productivity or output in the business. Because there's something about being on video, where when you're in a meeting where you just know this is not adding value or you're not making a decision, you just sort of like it's... Because we're on video all day long, it just ends up being draining, and we don't want to be a part of those meetings.
Aaron Levie:
And so you've almost sort of seen which things were actually moving the business forward, which meetings, which processes, which business reviews, and then which things were actually previously that you just did out of just, it was the bureaucracy that kind of just crept into the company. I think what we've seen is really stripping away of all of those meetings, all of those processes that weren't adding value to the organization, that weren't freeing up the developer time or marketing campaign time or sales people's time. And you're able to really get to the essence of what does it mean for somebody to be productive or what does it mean for a team to be productive. And ultimately, it's probably producing something that ultimately the delivers customer value and everything else is sort of like friction that gets in the way. And I think we've been able to find ways where we can get rid of that in this virtual environment and ultimately let the organization be more productive as a result of that.
Betty Liu:
We've got time for one or two more questions before we need to end this. And Jen, I want to bring you back in, because we lost you there with the technical difficulties. You were talking about culture and we have a couple of questions actually coming in about culture and just how you continue to amplify and unify people around a culture. If you continuing work from home environment and a distributor workplace model, what's your answer?
Jennifer Tejada:
Well, I think given just the nature of this environment and all the uncertainty that exists for all of us, it's really just this tremendous opportunity to embrace the humanity of what we're in together. I mean, the one thing that's really interesting about what's happening is that we're all sort of experiencing similar circumstances, the work, shelter in place, being stuck at home, being on video all day long, et cetera, like whether you're a leader or an individual contributor in the organization, there's this shared sort of burden of we're now more than 90 days into not being able to work together in teams the way that we have before. And I think our employees look for us to demonstrate vulnerability and be open and transparent about the things that we're uncertain about. The old model of the CEO having all the answers is dead.
Jennifer Tejada:
The new CEO is a constant learner, is open, is honest, engenders trust at every point through action, not just their words. And I think that having the ability to lean into empathy means that you really do have to live your values every day in front of your team. And in order to be in front of your team, you have to become the very visible, which requires an effort. You also have to be open to admitting like this is fatiguing, this is hard. My exec team and I were on our weekly Zoom yesterday. And we do something every other meeting where we kind of just do a quick update and a big part of that update is how are you feeling? Like, how are things going? What's in the top 5% of your highlights and what's in the bottom 5% of your low lights.
Jennifer Tejada:
And there was a lot of commonality in how fatigued people are because for long hours, Stewart mentioned the long list of uncertainties that we're all working for. And that list keeps getting bigger. The Zoom factor, the blue light for 12, 14 hours a day can't be healthy for anybody. And so we step back from all of that. And you say, what does this mean for my leadership style and my culture. It means the human connection, whether it's virtual or physical just became more important and that you and your leadership team have to be engaging at every level of your organization more frequently than you ever thought you needed to be before. And we're using every possible technology you can imagine, including the plain old phone to do that, to be constantly checking in with people, but also to remind them what our mission is, what got them here in the first place and why our opportunity is bigger than ever now.
Jennifer Tejada:
I mean, we like, I think Box and Slack experience some tailwinds associated with the current environment and reminding people that the reasons they came to PagerDuty are still there and there's new reasons to be engaged and excited about the problems that we're solving for our customers.
Jennifer Tejada:
The last thing I would say is like listening is so important, like really hearing how your teams are doing, how your customers are doing, how their problems have changed, the challenges that they are struggling to solve became a lot more important and nothing when it comes to change, there's nothing that's off the table. Like Aaron talked about getting rid of all the crappy meetings that aren't productive, but there's no sacred cow left in the place. Like you should be reanalyzing everything. Every convention you thought made sense for you may no longer make sense for you and stuff you thought was ridiculous maybe the most important project you ever take on.
Betty Liu:
Great, great point. And look, we're at the end of our session here, which I feel like we'd go on for another half hour. So I'm going to end it with one quick roundabout here to the three of you, put you on the spot. What has been the one tool that you've used outside of your own that has helped you work from home?
Stewart Butterfield:
It's a really tough question. I'm trying to make this one sentence to see how complicated I can make it grammatical. It's a tough question. And I think honestly, the things where I've been spending most of my time have been in hardware in this setup, like the physical infrastructure that we're now having to replace in our homes. Because I'm used to... I try not to take anyone for granted, but I'm used to just walking into the conference room and everything works because we have a great team. And now when it's all DIY, it's a little bit of an investment. I'm really excited though about the future of this kind of communication that doesn't have to be synchronous, that doesn't require that we're both paying attention at the same time. And we see so much of that in the consumer world with things like Instagram stories that I'm really curious to see how that works its way into enterprise communications.
Betty Liu:
Great. How about you, Aaron?
Aaron Levie:
I definitely agree that there's nothing that makes you feel more incompetent than having to run your own IT setup at home. And you immediately are aware of all of the thousands of variables that your IT organization has to deal with on a daily basis that you didn't have to have as top of mind. So we're all in need of that. I'd say that on the infrastructure side, I want to give one shout out. I moved to AT&T Fiber and it was game changing for my life and it costs less than our cable subscription. So if you can find a way to get on fiber, it's great experience if it works in your area.
Aaron Levie:
But I think I'm very thankful for the broad array of cloud applications that we get to run our business on, two of which are on this call, but for our ops teams to be able to be as productive as with services like PagerDuty. And for just the daily communication and work that's happening on Slack, we we had a hackathon last night. This is where for whatever reason employees decide, they want to stay up for 24 hours straight. And we had our global hackathon last night and it was great at 2:00 and 3:00 and 4:00 AM people just sharing their ideas in the Slack channel and the latest innovation that they were working on. And it really kind of brings together the community. It doesn't require hackathon, but that virtual experience can really bridge a lot of divides that might normally exist in time zones and departments and org design and just physical office locations. So when you do move that virtually, you do have an opportunity to bring together people in a way that wasn't possible before.
Betty Liu:
All right, great. And Jen, and you close it out for us. I don't think anybody's hearing my one sentence requirement here, but tell me your one productivity tool.
Jennifer Tejada:
I'll give it a go. They're two. One is the API-led interoperability between all the tools. I think one of the reasons we have so much leverage as a cloud native company is because all of our products work seamlessly together. And if you are a company that's working with stuff that doesn't know exactly the pain I'm talking about when you need a systems integrator to stitch that stuff together. You should be able to log into something and start using it and getting value. That's the way the world has to work now.
Jennifer Tejada:
The second thing I would say is the phone. I mean, sorry, the camera in my phone, the photography, the webcam, the ability to be able to share images with people and use imagery as a replacement of being physically together. I feel like there's going to be some incredible photo journalism and cinematography that's going to come from this time because we were also relying on the lens in our phones and in our computers.
Betty Liu:
Well, terrific. Well, I have to say, we've been doing quite a few of these virtual, these webinars. This has been by far the most fun and engaging. I've been getting a lot of comments already in the Q&A box from the audience thanking you guys for taking the time and saying how terrific this content has been. So thank you, Jen, Aaron, Stewart, so great to have you three as digital leaders on the NYSC. We so appreciate you being a part of our community. So thank you so much. And I will end it here. Thank you all for joining.
Josh King:
Thank you to Stacey and Betty for hosting the Digital Leaders panel on The Future of Work. And that's our conversation for this week. Our guests were Aaron levie, CEO of Box, that's NYSE ticker symbol, BOX, Jennifer TejadA, CEO of PagerDuty, NYSE ticker symbol, PD, and Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, NYSE ticker symbol, WORK, which spells work. And with that, we'll let you get back to your work, wherever you might be in the world right now remotely or at home. And as we always say, if you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch and Ian Wolff with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Romanchik. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the remote library of the New York Stock Exchange here in the Catskills of Upstate, New York. Thanks for listening, stay safe. And we'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE, nor is affiliates, make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
