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The company’s head of human resources, Jennifer Saavedra, says she finds computing and infrastructure giant Dell Technologies rethinking its assumptions about the business world and redefining every expectation. “Earlier I heard people say, ‘I can’t wait to go back to doing things the way they were before. It’s never a strategy for success,” says Saavedra. “It’s about reflecting on the past 18 months. What have we learned? What are some of the great things we want to move forward? What were some of these challenges or obstacles? How do we set expectations?”

Saavedra sees many “great things”: opportunities to be more efficient, productive and inclusive, and ways for the redesigned workplace to achieve previously impossible goals.

For example, Dell’s sales force of more than 25,000 could never have come together in one place, let alone the human resources, finance and marketing team that supported them. Like many companies, Dell would host face-to-face training and leadership events for all sales executives and relied on shared strategies and sense of purpose at these meetings to rank high.

The pandemic has changed everything. Suddenly, managers could not meet face to face, but everyone was able to meet virtually on video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Saavedra says that while it’s a great opportunity for connection and communication, it’s hard to figure out how to interact with so many people in a virtual environment. “You don’t just try to repeat what you did in a face-to-face or classroom experience.”

Resources for improving skills or absorbing new material, often offered in group or classroom settings in the olden days, have moved online to the Dell Learning Studio, which people can visit individually at their leisure. The group component of virtual events now focuses on collaboration and networking. “Instead of a leadership program or training program, it is now a training experience or leadership experience,” adds Saavedra. “This change in language actually reflects the change in design.”

Dell has redesigned its entire training function: for example, it expanded individualized learning plans and increased group training in more job functions for each of its 15,000 engineers to address specific knowledge gaps and needs.

Embracing technology and culture together

Redefining the workplace to be independent of a physical location required fundamental changes in technology and organizational culture. For the most part, it wasn’t meant to redefine “business”, focusing on results like productivity, innovation, communication, customer experiences, and other key performance metrics. But for many employees, these rapid and necessary changes have proven that the work environment can be flexible, collaborative, and location-independent and still get the job done—perhaps even better than before. Output (achievement of goals) has largely replaced facetime as the primary performance metric.

Global consulting firm Deloitte calls the new paradigm “distributed by design.” His research reveals that 77% of employees say they can be as productive (or more) as working from home (even though they often think they are about 58% of the time). “Employers should focus on improving the workforce experience by reducing mandatory meetings and email and focusing on culture and well-being,” says Alex Braier, general manager, corporate strategy, design and transformation at Deloitte and US public sector leader.

Dell’s data also reflects improved working conditions, including less stress and better connections with colleagues. For example, more than half of organizations that have established a “hybrid” business model, that is, incorporating a mix of in-office and remote work into their employee schedules, report improved employee satisfaction and well-being.

While many experienced managers are not comfortable in the distributed workplace because they think they can manage people better when they can see it, Braier says it’s a myth. “The percentage of workers you can see at any given time is very small. Doing business using virtual collaboration tools can allow you to collect huge amounts of data, and by mining that data you can do a much better job of understanding how the work is actually done.”

Administrators in an organization can use metadata created in collaboration platforms to see which employees collaborate and which are excluded, which leads and attends meetings. They can advance their organization’s diversity, equality and inclusion goals by monitoring whether various groups and interests are represented on all relevant teams. Relying on metadata rather than tracking individual activity allows leaders to monitor the overall health of their distributed workforce, while keeping data mining anonymous.

Black Friday at Dell—the biggest sales day of the year for many retailers—was always a high-pressure face-to-face event, with “battle rooms” set up around the world to monitor and react to each individual’s performance. promotion and hundreds of employees working around the clock. Jen Felch, Dell’s chief digital and computing officer, said the pandemic has forced a major overhaul by moving entire boards from centralized war rooms to individual screens of team members in their homes and setting alerts so they don’t miss important information. or opportunities to take action in case they move away.

The transformation has been so successful that the company has chosen to continue on the “pandemic path” even though it may at least partially consider returning to the face-to-face order for 2021. That way, “People can stay at home. They can have dinner with their family” and still be effective, says Felch.

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This content is produced by Insights, the exclusive content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by the editorial staff of MIT Technology Review.