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Nothing will be the same when corporate America goes back to the office, and one longtime tech CEO believes a permanent change could be the death of the “open office.”
Carol Bartz, who led Autodesk Inc. ADSK, +1.99% for a decade before heading up Yahoo Inc. during a turbulent era that began during the last recession, is known for being direct and speaking her mind. In a recent telephone interview with MarketWatch from her home in Silicon Valley, Bartz described the current age of COVID-19 as a “new game,” with “new rules” for everyone, and made a few predictions on how she expects life could change going forward, especially at work.
“I think office space is going to change, we will go back to putting shields between people,” she said, adding that while she realizes this is minutia, this is one of the many kinds of changes that CEOs are going to have to address in the future, in what will be the new life of the CEO. “We have to take the fear away from people,” she added, noting that this will probably be the first time offices will have to be designed around health reasons
Instead of the old office cubicles separating desks, “They probably will be clear, you will not sit there in that big open space. I think people are going to want protection, plexiglass or whatever. There will also be more teleconferencing, absolutely less flying, you will teleconference with customers, they don’t want to see you in person and you don’t want to see them,” Bartz said.
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Bartz, who worked in the tech industry for decades, is now an investor and chairman of a privately held cannabis company in San Jose called Caliva. Since getting unceremoniously ousted at Yahoo in 2011, Bartz has also served on the boards of Intel Corp. INTC, -0.79%, Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, +1.55% and several other companies.
She said it is also likely that more companies will continue to allow or even prefer employees work from home if they can, which could also eliminate the cost of some office space.
“I think as many industries as possible will continue to work at home and the companies will get better as to how to manage it. That’s good for a lot of reasons — it’s good for heath, it’s good for people who have those obligations, like small children.”
She said that 15 years ago, companies were tough on the concept of working from home, in part because they did not have the tools to deal with remote work, and it was often reserved for special situations.
“We have to figure out what those rules are and how it works for each company, maybe it’s better for certain divisions than others. There will not be as many people willing to move around, they will not be ready to jump on planes.”
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Some industries are now being forced to use technology in ways mostly avoided so far, such as physicians, who usually prefer seeing patients in person. “In the last 5 days, I had 4 telemedicine appointments with doctors. I never had one in my life before, now in the last 4 days, it’s all been telemedicine,” she said.
Bartz said that whatever huge changes a company is going through during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most important things is that leaders be honest with employees about what is happening. Bartz, always known for being blunt — especially in her tenure at Yahoo, when she was a refreshing change for tech reporters for her brutal honesty and salty language — said CEOs should have video chats or streamed videos with employees, because it’s too easy for memos to be rewritten by staff.
“They want to see your eyes and your face and read you a bit, now they want to see does this person look scared or what,” she said, as many CEOs are going to be faced with cutting jobs.
“When someone has their first layoff, they want to say, they will never do this again. Please don’t say that — sure enough, you will have another one six months later.”
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She said if someone asks about layoffs, and there is nothing planned at this time, say that, but also say you don’t know about the future. “Never say never. I hear people say it all the time, never and always. I hate those two words. When you are that absolute about something, you better have it sitting right in front of you.”
These times will also likely bring a lot of self doubt among executives who feel stress because they are supposed to have all the answers, or that they have to fix the problems themselves. She said while she was at Autodesk during the dot-com boom, the company did not have a way to sell its shrink-wrapped, complex engineering software for computer-aided design over the early internet.
“I kept thinking I had to fix this,” she said. “When I finally got that out of my head, that I was not that important, and got thinking about how we strategically could involve our customers and employees to go forward, that was a big moment for me.”
Bartz said the world is going to change in many ways that we don’t yet realize because of the pandemic.
“There are just certain things that until we know that we can be densely packed pretty safely, I don’t think many people will go out,” she said. “I don’t think we will know the new normal for two years, people are just going to go slow.”
