Good afternoon everybody my name is Janelle Rios with the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute this is a state agency in collaboration with the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and this is our TEPHI Talks so welcome to TEPHI Talks and today we have a special guest speaker who I will be introducing in just a moment. first I'd like to tell you a little bit about our structure. We're a new state agency with three pillars: Readiness, Training, and Communications. In Readiness, we have an early detection program, specifically with wastewater,
which is very exciting. We analyze data, we have a rapid assessment program, we have programs that are specific to vulnerable populations and food chain preparedness, and uh business operations resiliency. TEPHI Talks is one of those um is a part of business operations resiliency. We have a Communications core which supports this broadcast or webcast, I should say, and we have a strong Training and Resources core that promotes training, delivers training, develops training , both in person and online. We have several different target audiences that include scientists and healthcare providers; or, as in this webcast business operators. We also have a very strong training program for community health workers across the state. And of course
the lay public is welcome to attend any of these events and all Texans can attend them at no cost. So one training program that I'd like to highlight is our Certificate in Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Again this is free. You know, if you go through it, all the courses it takes about 16 hours in total to go through all five sections of the course It's for anybody who is interested in infectious diseases and preparedness. It includes four self-paced asynchronous courses and one online Capstone exercise that is live, but online. We provide the textbooks and again this is free to all Texans. So if you are interested in this program please scan the QR code down on the screen or visit TEPHI.texas.gov to learn more.
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I'd like to introduce Emily Dreyer. She's Vice President of Workplace Environment at Dell Technologies. In this role Emily is directly responsible for the strategic development and planning of Dell Technologies real estate portfolio, team member experience, space planning, and that's always challenging, and environment health and safety teams. So with that I'm going to stop sharing and turn it over to Emily. Thanks again Emily for being here.
Absolutely I'm happy to be here and I wish this was around when we were facing some of the things we faced during the the pandemic. And and I'm really excited to share what what we've learned. And I think we've been planning this talk I think it's a popular uh talk to do because we got we got into the agenda I think we started planning this about a year and a half ago. And at that time we were definitely at a different stage in uh in the pandemic than we are today and so when we revisited coming in and talking I thought you know one thing we've been doing is reflecting on the last two and a half years uh and and by no means do we feel like you know Covid is still around and so we're not saying it's over but what have we learned and and what are some of the best practices that that we've learned and I'll talk a little bit about that today. Ironically we ended up with seven lessons learned or best practices so I jokingly said to my team we should coin it The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pandemic Managers but I thought me maybe Stephen Covey was gonna have a problem with that. So we won't plagiarize any books but we want to talk a lot about what we
learned as a technology company. As Janelle said I would encourage you to ask questions I think the thing we've learned the most over the last two and a half years is that by asking questions, by learning best practices, by sharing what we've done, we've educated ourselves a lot. We've learned a lot along the way and if we're faced with another pandemic, epidemic or some kind of health event like this again I think we've learned a lot, world lessons learned throughout that. And so
what I want to talk a little about is you know my job scope has changed since the beginning in of the pandemic in 2020 until now and prior to that I didn't have a background in environment health safety and did take that on during the pandemic and has been it's been like a fire hose of learning information and learning from my team and I will tell you one of the things is, no matter what, when this all started happening, there was just so much out there these are a few highlights we pulled the highlights excuse me um headlines that we pulled as we were going through this and having to make decisions on things that we never knew we were going to have never thought we would have to make a decision on and didn't even know sometimes which direction we should go and we'd pick a direction and the next day something would come out that would contradict that. And so I think really why this is important to me is we'll get into it but it's it's really what we've been saying from the beginning as a technology company is using data and science as best we can and really shying away from making assumptions or or going with what everybody else is doing but really kind of settling ourselves in and we'll talk about how we did that. And so as I mentioned I've pulled seven of the lessons learned of things we have done we did during the pandemic or we discovered or problems we addressed and then how we're using some of that in our regular day-to-day interactions or business processes so some things we started for the pandemic we're actually using in a totally different way um today but the genesis of the idea came out as we were working through the crisis management. So I would be remiss - we're a technology company - if I didn't say we'll start the first one with the digitization and the technology and how we used it, Since March of 2020 and and keep in mind we're a technology company we do end-to-end technology services we're probably best known for our desktops or notebook laptops um but we are end to end. And so what that means is we had people during the pandemic out in the field servicing frontline workers, hospital data centers , trying to get equipment in it technology pieces out to those on the front lines trying to be the first responders in what was going on and things were constantly changing. I remember in March of 2020
we were already working through what was happening in Asia and trying to understand that and trying to predict what would happen next and I don't think anybody could have thought through what was going on in December then to what was happening in March of 2020. The first phone call we got was one of our team members was in with a customer working on a data center and was exposed and that was the first time we were sitting going okay this is something we're going to have to deal with. Well that one turned into over 22,000 self-reporting cases of team members across the world continuing to report in. Those are just the people who actually reported I'm sure there was a lot that were working for home that didn't report. And we were working with a very small EHS and nursing crew uh as I mentioned where technology our health and safety program is around workplace safety, not around kind of in fact managing infectious disease. So we had a lot to learn and we had one mailbox for Global EHS where we were getting thousands of emails all sorts of questions. And the first thing we said is this isn't sustainable because what we were
missing is maybe somebody who really needed an urgent response versus someone who was just asking a question and probably 50 other people have that question. And so we started to look at our processes and had a triage some of those requests ask people to a few questions in advance through a form and then be able to triage it and put it to the right direct people to be able to respond quicker. We are EHS staff and team members worked really long days um you know seven days a week like many did working through that they were calling each person that submitted, so it's over 40,000 phone calls, emails, follow-up questions um just to make sure doing contact tracing to answer any kind of questions of support keeping in mind that we still didn't have all the answers so I think that was a huge knowledge of being able to use technology to kind of triage and provide the information was it one step to okay this is a little bit more manageable we still felt overwhelmed but that tool helped us going down the path of what we needed to do. The second piece is we actually helped we actually had folks from our supply chain who took a leave of absence from Dell and went and worked with the state to help with PPE and other supplies that were really short and limited at the time and everybody was trying to get them everybody I know I think every day I had somebody else emailing me who had gotten into the PPE business so we wanted to be really thoughtful and careful one that we weren't getting a bunch of PPE and taking it away from frontline workers who needed it most um but that when we did buy PPE we're buying it from a quality brand that we could actually get out to our field delivery teams. And so one of the things we did is we vetted that using our procurement process and we also actually um created SKUs for our PPE so when we were going into hospitals and KN95 masks or different types of equipment was actually a SKU for our service delivery team. And so when they were ordering parts to go to a customer
they could also order their PPE through our supply chain program and we were drop shipping to people's homes again using technology and making sure our team members had what they needed from a standpoint of servicing and being safe at the same time and then we had a dashboard to manage our inventory so we leveraged our manufacturing locations around the world as hubs to bring the PPE in and then being able to ship it back out. We also during that time helped get PPE to healthcare workers and donating what we were able to get a little bit quicker making sure we were putting it back into the community and not kind of monopolizing it since we didn't need as much as some of the a lot of the hospitals and others that were being overwhelmed at the time. So a lot of this is the lessons learned from the technology side and we also did a lot with hybrid where we were doing for the first time ever ISO audits were all done virtually via Zoom We put a lot of our regulatory compliance and third-party certifications were also done virtually, and not in person, so a lot of changes for us and I think for the most part it was easier for us as a technology company and that's what I would also say as we think about this is there were some things we learned that probably wouldn't be appropriate or make sense for other organizations but for what we were doing it the virtual part of this became easier for us and it became a part of what we do. So today our EHS functions leverage our tools that we created for self-reporting we still do that we do event management and we'll talk about a little bit about what we do there then we actually created our own health attestation tool and we're leveraging that technology as part of an application uh to use it for some of our hybrid in some of our pilot spaces so a lot of this technology and tools that we came out in automation not only helped us during the pandemic but we've transferred some of that over to help streamline some of our current processes as we think about or how our nurses and and others respond to medical needs for the team throughout the throughout the year. The other piece I would say that was really interesting for us is as a global company, we operate in 68 countries and 47 states around the U.S and every regulation whether we needed a temperature screening whether we need to do had to have vaccines we had or doing required testing what kind of PPE do we have to do health screens all of that I was kind of looking for somebody to say I've got it all in this tool I can just go look and see how things are changing and that didn't that didn't happen I didn't see it. And so we actually developed in-house with our security
resiliency office as well as our own organization and our corporate affairs organization built a database full of um information that was coming in as regulations were changing. Because, again, um we had we had field text that needed to get out into the field and we need to make sure that one they were protected from a PPE and infectious disease perspective but also protected from the standpoint if they were if there was a lockdown and they needed to get to a data center that they could have a clear path to get there and they wouldn't be stopped by government authorities because they didn't have the right clearance or right card to get to where they needed to go to fix equipment. So again a lot of this relied on technology and moving things along to try to react as quick as we could especially given how quickly things were changing and how much we we didn't know going into this and what we could do to kind of come back out of it. The biggest thing and I think this is something that I talked a little bit and Janelle mentioned my bio - is I have space planning uh as well as EHS and one of the things that we've been doing for over a decade at Dell is we've had a program called Connected Workplace. So yes we had all these field members out and about and we have our data centers running and our manufacturing facilities operating but then we have the rest of our teams. And so we were really lucky from a standpoint of for over a decade, we used Connected Workplace as a way to encourage teams to be able to work from home a couple days a week or in some cases they work from home 100% of the time. And so there was a weekend in
March where we made the call to have globally all of our team members work from home if they could, which ended up being 90% of our team members. So the only ones that weren't working from home were the ones running our data centers, our factory, and then we had people out in the field. But that also changed from a health and safety perspective how we manage remote work uh and so a couple things we we did is we we worked closely with HR as a matter of fact at Dell, environment health safety facilities all reported to the chief HR officer which makes this much easier as we think about how we manage the organization and how we continue to put people first. Sometimes you have organizations like ours and they sit in a different group maybe finance or legal or procurement. Sitting in HR has allowed us to really put the team members at the focal point of what we try to do and the decisions we make and hybrid, and the emphasis on hybrid and remote work is is no different. It's a great example of that. And so while we had 90% of our team members working from home one of the
things we were concerned about - and I and I'll give a prize if anybody wants to guess I'll follow up with the team and send something out - a couple of things when we sent people home was well let's make sure when they go home that they have the right IT technology that they need easier for us to do because we're a tech company we make a lot of it. So we sent people home we coordinated pickups with their monitors their keyboards their mice and the number one thing also was their chair. And the reason we did the chairs was because we were observing via Zoom people sitting and probably not the best ergonomic setup at home whether it was on a couch or a kitchen stool. And so we actually offered the opportunity to bring your chair home uh and we we had a significant number of chairs globally that we shipped uh to people's homes so that they could have a decent place to sit while they were trying to work from home. We realized probably after two weeks that it was gonna be much longer that people are going to have to work from home and so if anybody has any guesses of how many chairs we we sent home with everybody um I'll give closest to the to the number we'll send something out to you. But not only from a technology perspective in the
in the tools um we also started looking at how do we ensure the health and safety of our of our teams while they're at home and so we continue to offer ergonomic assessments but we reevaluated those to look at how do you do that online. How do we do online ergo assessments? In some countries we actually send someone to someone's home if they request to look at their home desk set up. In other countries we're required to take a picture of the home office and make sure it meets all the qualifications for what a safe office looks like when you're working from home. The other thing that um was interesting for us prior to the pandemic we had volunteers who helped with emergency response. And so if we had a campus or large building usually on each floor we'd have
someone who was on site and prepared to deal with an emergency should one arise now imagine we've sent 90% of our team members home buildings are kind of empty what happens if we have an event that happens and there's not we can't we don't have a way to react or find out who's there. So one thing we have done is in certain locations we've actually developed a visual check-in board to see do we have emergency response team members on site um and how many people do we have on site so that we're prepared if something were to happen we know we have the right resources to respond to that. The same thing if I'm just making sure we know who's in the buildings and then we're also working on some more technology to see if something were to happen to make sure we have real life reporting back of how many people are on the in the building so that we can respond appropriately. And that
was a huge piece of this that we didn't think about before because while we encouraged remote or hybrid work um we still had a significant number of people in the site. And now we're looking at offices that we're consolidating. But we are looking at offices that have vast footprints and sometimes we don't know who exactly is in the building so we're focusing on that and continuing to use that as a as an example for um for best practice in the future. And the other thing that we've done is we've taken a harder look at our field delivery team. So I talked about our office workers our manufacturing teams that stayed there continuing to produce. We had a tremendous number
of field services people that were on the front lines trying to help customers and so we looked at our scope of work and our processes for getting them to understand what do they need and what how do they need to be trained to be protecting themselves and also how do we manage customer requirements. We had field delivery teams who were going into a customer in one customer required temperature screening another customer required a certain type of PPE and so making sure we're keeping up to date with all of that. And at one area we did that as we again added it to a workplace app where people could check that. And again the same thing as customers requiring
vaccinations or testing. All of that was trying to figure out how do we support those field people and health and safety took a different eye if you will as a to just focusing on workplace safety is really looking at how we have that in the field and how we're looking at it in the field. So I'd say across the board that we're still trying to figure out the right hybrid model and hybrid approach but we're really putting a focus on mental health well-being physical health well-being all the things you've got to think about in this new hybrid world and the other thing we're talking about isn't we're a focus for this year is if we're on Zoom with someone and we've had a couple instances luckily nothing serious where somebody did have a medical emergency and if you're on Zoom do people know how to respond um to that because in a lot of places you don't just call 9-1-1. So we're working through what does it mean to be health and safety from a more remote population and work support and make sure we're still giving the same duty of care to our team members that we did pre-pandemic when everybody was in the office. And I think so basically we have the technology how we're looking at hybrid work but none of this would have been possible if we didn't do a good job of working together cross-functionally which would be number three.
And some of these you know I don't think they're in any type of order I think they're all important um but what made me the most proud during the pandemic was the ability for a company of our size of over 135,000, to get stakeholders together to make decisions to be agile to trust leadership to trust each other to make the things we need to do and to make them successful and I will tell you one of the things that probably sets us apart is our is our culture and our people and putting the people first. When we would get on calls you always heard executives say we've got to think about the people what does this do the business was of course important but we really had to put a focus on the health and safety of what was happening um and some of that looked very different than what you would think of from a technology company. So in one example when the pandemic hit pretty hard in India we were getting oxygenators and getting those out using our processes and our tools getting oxygenators out to team members in India and their families who couldn't there was just not enough supplies and there was such a shortage there doing vaccine clinics that required a lot of cross-collaboration because the folks that were sitting in India they didn't have they were worried about their families they didn't necessarily have the time to think about how to kind of a broader Dell so we came in and helped from a standpoint of outside of India helping those team members to make sure we're taking care of each other. And there was multiple examples of that where we had to work with different groups across the board and I think the way this worked and we're still using this process today is I would get on benchmarking calls and I would hear of other company peer companies who had these massive response teams for the pandemic and I would look at our 40-person or so group who met almost every day to talk about what was going on from each area and I was like gosh they're really you know they have a lot more people over here. What I realized now is by having each function represented at a senior level very core group structured agenda we were able to make decisions quicker and we were able to use the the data and the information we had to make sure we could trickle that information down and set up a really good structure from a standpoint of how we were dealing with this from a from a tops down and then how we would get it all cross communicated across the board. So I think another thing here is that you know as we looked at this, we had so many interactions within the company to get to move the ship if you if you will it seemed a lot easier during the pandemic and we kind of scratched our heads and said shouldn't this be like this all the time and so in certain things where we're looking at our hybrid work strategy or how we look at other things we put together these smaller groups that are like tiger teams to help make decisions and get decisions made faster still using data and science to drive it but taking out some of the bureaucracy so that we can be more agile and get to the right solution or change something if it's if it's not working .
And I think that was you know the other piece of this and then one other example that I love that we still use today is we have a pretty decent talent acquisition team who was their primary job is to recruit and hire for Dell. In the beginning of the pandemic we didn't we weren't hiring none of us knew what was going to happen we didn't know what the economy would do so we weren't hiring so we had TA resources who were strong who had people who people who had strong skills who weren't really busy. And so what we did is reallocated them and so I had a couple of them come over and help with PBE inventory in project management um and what it translated into and we had already started down this path is more of a gig economy of leveraging resources if somebody's not that busy on a certain project how could they maybe help with another project. And again it's just working together cross-functionally to get that out of and it worked out really well because those people were very familiar with Dell processes and so we were able to pull them over to our team they were able to help and then when we started hiring again they went back to their roles. So it was a really good way of keeping key talent but also leveraging skill sets that are
across that can be used cross-functionally um to really get what we need the help we needed and the support we needed at the time. So I think that that was you know a lot of the of what we looked from a cross-functional perspective. And then I'd say the other piece that was very different for us um and I don't want to say it was it was different but maybe it's a different type of data so we were I mentioned how we were dealing with a lot of information coming in a lot of questions coming in people giving us data and information about themselves we probably didn't want them to share. But people didn't know what was going on and what we had to really be thoughtful of is for the first time we're used to handling customer data we take a lot of classes on how important it is to make sure we keep our customer data secure our our people data secure but now we were getting medical data in medical information about people. And so what we did immediately we have a great privacy office we worked with them on understanding what are the laws that are in play here making sure from a team member perspective we're respecting privacy but we're getting the information we need to help support them and what do we need to go do. And it was you know there were some challenging times where when we our policy on um vaccines and testing was that we asked that people get vaccinated and if they didn't get vaccinated um we asked them to get tested if they came to site.
Where do you put that information? So we had to set up an entirely separate database for that information because it can't be cross-referenced or can't be mixed in with personnel records. And so none of that existed. You have HR systems that weren't necessarily prepared to then hold medical records so they couldn't. So we had to really think about how are we going to make sure we protect this and we're keeping the data and then we have a way to dispose of the data when we don't need it anymore. And that's very different than dealing with a workplace injury or some of the other things we do from an EHS perspective that we potentially don't you know wouldn't handle this type of data really had to think about it and now looking at it going forward we have a much better system and process and structure in place of how we would probably look at any other future events that might happen like this in a much better position to handle those. And so I think across
the board you know the working together getting using the technology and then how we're looking at a hybrid world and in remote and then how we're handling the different types of information that we've been given uh that we haven't ever dealt with before there were so many firsts in this pandemic I think one of my favorite sayings was when a senior leader would ask me Emily what are we doing here and I said let me check the handbook of the last pandemic we went through and you know there wasn't one. And we didn't know what we were going to do but we had to put our our heads together and problem solve on it of how would we do this and what was the best way to keep keeping team members first what was the best way to react into into to make the decisions we needed to do. And I think based on that another another one of our best practices or one of the things that I've learned I mentioned early in the call at the beginning of the pandemic I I was helping our EHS team but I wasn't responsible for it and now I have their they're under our organization and I always tell them no one knows you're there until something goes wrong. And so they were in the forefront and I hear from them all the time I see now I see what they do day to day and I have a much better appreciation for them and the skill sets that they have and being in a technology company and having health and safety and environment experts sometimes goes overlooked and I think it's just making sure that we understand there's other support organizations out there and we've got to make sure that we're supporting them and giving them the resources they need uh we have we put a lot of effort into training people training on workplace safety training on how we handle an incident at work and it with the forefront the idea of keeping our team members safe now looking at this is having a more robust policy on personal protective equipment making sure we're offering the right training for those team members so that if another something like this comes up again we have an idea of how to handle this and the other part of this that um you know how do we conduct health risk assessment assessments how do we think about predictive analysis and predictive modeling and then when do we make the decision of if it's a work related incident or a work-related virus versus something that maybe is not contracted at work and how do you calm the fear of people I think one example we had is coming you know as the pan as things were getting a little bit more organized and slowing down with covid you all sudden start hearing about monkey pox and so the question immediately the questions and there's the fear of people of what's going to happen and you know and the team was very good to talk about the differences and how it's a different disease than what Covid is and so it's really thinking through that and making sure that yes we are doing we do a great job we have strong team members and technology but we also need to make sure we have the right people in place from the health and safety perspective of the organization. And one of the reasons that is so key and I have I have two more uh lessons learned from Dell and I'm hoping there's some lessons you guys can share or or questions you have for me I'm happy to take those but two more lessons we learned and one of those is tied to communications. I think communications and change management while they're two different things they're two of the most important things that that need to be done well especially in times of uncertainty.
I think everyone acknowledges that nobody really knew what was going on in the beginning of the pandemic - everything from the types of masks do you wear masks do they help do they not help how can we prevent this what are some of the precautionary measures even from a standpoint of how contagious is the virus and everything just kept changing. And then there was so much data and so so much information out there it was it was impossible to try to keep up. And one of the things we quickly learned we were and I still think we're guilty of this but in a lot of ways we were using static static communication that would via like email which then would get forwarded and it wouldn't get updated or a PowerPoint presentation that would have information and then it would sit in someone's desktop and somebody asked a question and they would forward it but by that time it might have been a week old and that data probably had changed and so one of the things we try to do now is everything was linked to one web page that was structured in a way that had frequently asked questions if someone asked a question and we didn't have the answer we went off and tried to find the answer and then posted it back on the website that saved us so much time it made sure we were consistent with our messaging and made sure that people you know so many people asked the same question, which was fine, and so then we had a platform to share the answer so that we can continue to provide the latest and greatest information. This was extremely helpful when we had site status updates - was a site open was a site closed where we were we asking everybody to work from home except for essential workers. That's something else we've carried through is to have the status update of our locations so people know what's going on. And we're also starting to work
on a subscription service where if you want to subscribe to a campus that is close to you so I'm I'm in Austin and I live close to the Round Rock campus I can subscribe and know what's happening around the campus if there's events going on if something else happens. Those are the type of things where we've learned from this and I think we've been we've get a lot of feedback from team members that they appreciated the transparency and they also appreciated the tremendous amount of information that we could provide. I will tell you uh one of the surprises I had and I think it says a lot about our culture is people felt very comfortable coming to us as their employer asking questions really that were health related but I think they felt comfortable that we would go figure out the answer and then make sure we were really thinking about their health and well-being um first and foremost as we as we managed our way through all the things that were happening.
And I think the the last the last lesson I would say is um what we learned early on and we saw some of our peer companies or competitors probably not necessarily take this into consideration is don't overreact and don't act too quickly um especially in the beginning and we've seen this with hybrid work where people are saying yes the new way of working is remote everybody should go remote and then a couple months later they say just kidding we're going to ask you all to come back into the office two days a week. One of the things we've done is saying look something can be urgent but it's not an emergency so there's a difference between urgency and emergency. And so just taking our time to make sure we're thinking through what are the ramifications what are some of the impacts how can we use data to leverage um making our decision and how do we feel about backing that up and if we were to go communicate that what do we think the consequences would be. And then also what we learned is sometimes the loudest voices aren't the majority and so not acting on a couple of things but really trying to understand a broader approach of how we're managing things. We have a global survey that we run through HR every year and we get over 90% participation. So leveraging information like that so that we're getting a more robust sample of what how people are feeling before we then go to a reaction to something that may not be an issue for the majority of the company. And I think that's that's the things we're trying to
do as we think about on what the positive things that were that came out of something that was really stressful for a lot of folks you know people lost family members we had team members that we lost and then our teams having to manage through things they just never thought they would have to deal with before I thought it would be helpful to bring the seven things we've learned um from that that we're going to continue on and take some positives out of out of what was a really stressful two and a half years as we managed to do some a lot of unknowns. So with that I hope there's some questions out there for me because I'd be happy to answer them. Thank you so much that was so informative and I learned a lot um especially with your best practices that I would love to employ here. So um let me get the ball rolling with questions out there. You mentioned that the they were changing guidances that would come out either through the World Health Organization or CDC or the State Health departments and you're a global company and keeping up with those updates was hard. Tell me about how did you decide the best method to
operationalize those guidances that came out and and I imagine it would be different in different locations. So what was that decision-making process like it's a great question and I think it was one where we quickly pivoted when we realized um sometimes we get we get blamed for they say they say everything comes out of Round Rock that's headquarters and so we were trying to make these decisions and we're sitting there and we have team members throughout the world. We flip the switch so how we manage crisis management is we have the level one which is our executive team level two which is where I would play with some of other Executives and then we have Regional Insight level teams that are in the local market. And we flipped it and said you guys tell us what's going on what support do you need from Global we're not going to micromanage because I'm not going to tell you what's happening in Germany when you're literally sitting there watching the news. And so we had to make that switch to say let our local leaders lead let us be available to them we were taking phone calls in the middle of the night. But listening to them first before
making an assumption because the data was just changing and that everything was happening so quickly so I think that was the biggest thing is enabling local leaders to make decisions and not trying to manage everything through through Round Rock. Nice nice. Good, thank you. You know and I'm looking right quick so in Rocio please interrupt me whenever we get a question, because I can I can ask questions all day. You also mentioned about the PPE specifically masks, and having to vet the quality of those masks. And that's something we experienced here at the University because we're also a healthcare facility - we deliver Health Care here - and we have I don't know something like over 100 clinics and a hospital here with the University and we needed medical grade PPE. And when that became in short supply we had a lot of vendors knocking on our doors saying hey we've got these you know and we had to find somebody to research the quality of those particular items. You know, we would refer to NIOSH
and their expertise but there were so many it was hard to keep up with that. How did you manage the quality of new PPE vendors? We essentially were in the same situation. I think those of you on the front lines had it more difficult because we didn't necessarily need medical grade while it would have been nice we were cautious not to go and purchase a bunch because we didn't want to take that out of the supply for hospitals and other health care facilities so while we weren't and I think that was the other piece too we had when we saw this coming in December in Asia we had actually started buying PPE for the idea that it would be for Asia we didn't think at any point did we have to then say this is going to be a global thing so we did have enough I would say to manage through we actually ended up donating some. But then we actually hired someone - we reallocated a resource from our procurement team to really go in and do an investigation of the vendor. I think that was the biggest thing is we had people who were privately previously doing restaurant supplies and now all of a sudden they're in the PPE business. So really being cautious of we're not going to go down that path we're going to stick with vendors that we can validate and make sure that somehow we can we can you know validate that that was the right person the right group to use. And we had issues you know in different countries where we ordered
PPE showed up and then what we got to our office was not was not what we ordered. And so just making sure that um even though we had a commitment and maybe somewhere along the line where it got into the country it was it got finally got to us it wasn't what we ordered. So investigating and making sure even we had it it was what we ordered and we were keeping team members safe.
um there is a funny story: I said we were putting PPE - we were drop shipping it to our team members as they were going out and fixing customer sites. And we had an example at first where we would put the PPE in with the part that they were going to fix and we had the part get hold held up in customs not because of the IT part, but because of the PPE. So we had to separate how we dropship to the to the customers and to the the team members. I mean I was just realizing maybe not everybody understands what PPE stands for. Oh, I apologize Protective - I put in well and I use the word uh or the acronym - so I'm gonna drop that into the chat as well. And encourage folks that if they have questions to to please drop them into the Q&A. And since there isn't a a big jump in there, we can also include the chat.
If you guys have questions there. I did see a guess - somebody guessed that you donated 37,000 chairs. That's really close! So it was it was it was 28,000 chairs. So I will make sure if we have that person's information I'll make sure to send a little something from Dell.
Okay so I think that's hilarious. Excellent excellent. It used to be my backdrop on on Zoom I used to have a bunch of chairs in my in my background picture. Okay I'm in the Texas Medical Center and I'm not sure if you could hear the ambulance going by. Nope? Okay good good. So let me ask another question then. You also brought up that you had to make a decision on when an injury or illness was work related and when Covid began to spread at the community level rather than just at the workplace and mostly at the healthcare facilities, how did you make the decision that illness was as a result of work activity rather than community spread. We use that with so it's a great question. So we're really proud of the fact that we didn't really have any clusters.
Which speaks a lot to keeping the facilities clean keeping people separated and then and then of course 90% of our team working from home. But we used our self-reporting tool which was huge because if I reported not feeling well and then Janelle you reported not feeling well, we had folks that were allowed to look at the information and then they would cluster so we would see okay you you were but we were both in the cafeteria at the same time so then we knew who who to call who to call and who to contact and we have to be really careful because we didn't I remember it was March 26 when I was in the round one of the Round Rock one buildings all of a sudden they were like we even got to evacuate the building because one person potentially had it. It's like we'd also don't want to cause mass panic. And so being thoughtful about well what's the real
and I think that was the hardest part of making a call of who do you communicate to and don't cause panic because people were so scared there were so many things we didn't know. But I think the tool was what helped us a lot to say okay this is a cluster this makes sense this other group maybe maybe not so much it got harder as people traveled so um when we started going back to conferences and events uh we had to you know we asked people to self-report but you never know if you're in the airport how the heck you decide if you got that at work or you just got a traveling So it's still a challenge we have but I think the tool that we use for self-reporting and to try to cluster helped tremendously with that. Great thank you. I was very surprised to hear how supportive or maybe I was I'm not surprised. Surprised is not the right word about the ergonomic support that you provided to the employees working from home um that's very impressive. And we've struggled with that decision you know how because I know in the early days I I was working on a teeny tiny laptop on a dining room chair and it so I personally went and bought a standing desk and I bought a better chair and I bought two monitors to plug it you know So and that's something that university couldn't support of course because you know we we just couldn't do it. But it's very impressive that Dell did. I'm really proud of the company when when we stood up to do that because the other thing we did is when we asked people to sign up for remote work one of the reasons was so we can offer a stipend so that you could go get a sit stand desk or you could go get what you other than your peripherals and again I realized we're a technology company so it's easier for us to do that so it's like one of those things that that's a place that's easier for Dell. But everyone has office chairs
and I think we had many conversations of well what happens if they don't bring the chair back? And I'm glad that we have leadership that says it doesn't matter we'd rather have people be safe. And so I do think that that was something that was nice to see them do and then the same thing with the stipends um is and the other reason we did a stipend as opposed to I know some companies provided sit stand desk we have people in all different parts of the world who have different spaces at home and so we didn't want to say we knew exactly what they needed so we did the stipends to allow them to make the decision for themselves. Nice nice. let me take a quick look here the chat. A lot of kudos for you Emily. The presentation was fabulous and answered many of my questions
um somebody else says no questions but this was great. A lot of similar lessons learned working for a federal government agency - entity. And we are a big customer of the federal government - they're a big customer of ours. And I think that was something else we had to consider as some of the federal regulations were coming in. How do we balance that with the the
non-federal parts of our business? So it was it was always an interesting day during those times. It is hard because it was a novel coronavirus and you know as experts learned more, the guidance changed, it became more refined and I think people forget that we were learning everything you know along the way and so that's why the guidance has changed you know to yes mask yes you know a double layer mask, now we've developed a vaccine yes you know vaccinate get boosters. So it definitely did change. Here's a question that probably speaks to your company culture but was impressed that your HR survey has 90% response rate. Do you offer incentives to get that response? We don't but um so I can't I can't tell you how it's amazing to see our culture. I think um the other thing I will tell you is as a leader I'm held to it's called Tell Dell and I'm held to my results and one of the questions on there is did we did we do what we said we would do from last year? And I think people realize it's anonymous - one - but they know that we take it very serious and I think people are willing to do a survey if they know you're going to actually take the results and make an action plan to go change them. And we are very very serious about doing that so I think that
probably is why we get such a high response rate. Wonderful. And we have another note. Thank you for an impressive presentation. And Rocio I see something else in the Q&A. It's basically a thank you as well from Jolene. She says thank you for the inside applying lessons from the pandemic to making things more efficient post-pandemic. Excellent. What what are the future plans for Dell? I mean if we have an influenza outbreak that becomes an epidemic or another outbreak especially if it's a via respiratory transmission. What are your plans?
I think well one thing we did is we had an infectious disease policy and I think the last time we had looked at it was like 2016. So one of the things we've committed to is looking at that policy. One we've looked at it lessons learned and then updating it. And then the other piece I think is that there's just so much we learned of from the processes we kept in place and we basically built a playbook that we would pick up and I think what this taught us because it was global is there's a lot we can learn so I feel like we're in a much better position if this were to happen again to be able to manage through that. And we you know we deal with little things throughout the the year anyway. We had a tornado in Round Rock that came through I think two springs ago. So I think taking all the lessons from this you can
apply them it doesn't have to be a pandemic but I think you know there'll be things we've learned along the way. And emergency response. I'd say if somebody asked me it's like one of my top 10 priorities for this year as we think about um emergency response in a remote world so the example I used about zoom and if something were to happen making sure our team feels supported and the same thing if something happens in a building and there aren't a lot of people around. Making sure we know how to get help to a team member. Wonderful. So you're creating a handbook for future pandemics. So you know the future you can look and flip around and say hey this is what they did last time. And it's interesting too - I don't
I don't know if you all are hearing this but I've had a couple people reach out to me um with technology that you know vendors that are startups um to try to predict the next pandemic and I don't know if we're there yet but it'd be kind of that was something that was actually realistic. And I'm sure there are scientists modeling that as we speak. Yes, there are. Yeah wonderful. If there are no other questions then we can draw this to a close. Any other questions out there? Yeah good. Emily thank you so much again you've been - oh wait there's one more quick question. Have you experienced a permanent shift in percentage of your workforce that now works remotely? Yes, yes. And we don't we don't mandate uh we don't mandate how many days you come into the office. What we are doing is reevaluating our real estate footprint so we're reducing our offices.
And then we're looking at an enhanced employee experience. So probably you'll see us if you we will have smaller offices and be more open to hybrid work as you need them. But we've definitely seen a dramatic shift in I'd say we had 90% people working from home. I'd say like 70% are still working from home. And again I think that speaks to we're a global company. If I ask my team
to come in, you're going to be coming in from like 12 different countries. So I think again it varies so that there's you know I have friends who work in a office in Austin and they come into the office but that's because when they come in there's a bunch of them. So I think it just varies. And we're not surprised at all that a lot of people continue to work from home. And that's part of how we hire as well. We hire from anywhere if you know if you have the skills and capabilities - we will hire no matter where you live. Wonderful thank you. Thank you again.
And I'll get in touch with you to send you a little thank you gift. Thank you and everybody thank you so much for joining us. And this concludes our webcast. Have a great day! Thanks everyone. Bye bye
2023-02-22