CIO Classified: Helping employees thrive in the hybrid workplace

With technological innovation accelerating faster than ever—and the pandemic entering a new phase—CIOs have never faced more uncertainty and complexity. That’s why we’ve partnered with Caspian Studios to sponsor Season 3 of the CIO Classified podcast.

CIO Classified is a podcast for CIOs, decision-makers, and technology leaders that want to push their business forward and stay on the cutting edge. Each episode features candid conversations with leading CIOs discussing their most pressing challenges and how they solve them.

Listen to the latest episode for insights and actionable strategies that you can bring back to your own organization today.

Episode summary

In this episode, Asana’s CPO Alex Hood and Nutanix’s CIO Wendy Pfeiffer discuss:

• Key findings from the latest Anatomy of Work Index

• Challenges in the hybrid workplace

• Optimizing asynchronous collaboration

• Organizing workflow structures

• Lessons from the great reset

• Adapting to a digital native workforce

Episode soundbites

“Folks like to do their skilled work in a place where they can be in focus and flow. But with the current arrangement of hybrid work, there’s been a lack of strategic co-creation. That’s important. One of the key drivers of employee engagement is, ‘I know how my skilled work ladders up to something greater.’ And without the co-creation in connection to that strategic work, the rest of your work feels more humdrum and you start to get more distracted. You start to get less engaged and feel less part of the team.” — Alex Hood, CPO at Asana

“As we switch from context to context, one of the keys to supporting sustained productivity is understanding how to enable asynchronous work and understanding how to bring together a team or a company when we’re not in the same room and timezone. At the heart of that is documentation and structure. Interestingly, creating documentation, structure, rules, and workflows and creating those in documented form is also the foundation for automation and machine learning and AI and all of these other things that we’ve been on the journey to implement.” — Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix

“At Asana, we have a system of record of who is doing what by when. With that map of work, you have the context to do your skilled work well, and you know exactly how it relates to the goal or the OKR that a company has. That makes it easier to have more clarity, and you don’t have to do as much work about work. Then, because the program management happens in the software, you don’t need to spend time together getting on the same page. Time spent together is focused on co-creation and building off each other’s ideas.” — Alex Hood, CPO at Asana

“The very notion of hybrid work is supportive of people who prefer to work in many different modes. By shining a light on that and looking at places where we have an opportunity to improve, we can ensure people don’t get left behind. Ultimately, we want to enable people who want to work full-time in an office, full-time remote, or in a hybrid mode. Technology plays a big role in this as does our own openness in leadership to accept new viewpoints and to think differently.” — Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO at Nutanix

Episode guests

Alex Hood, CPO, Asana

Alex Hood is Asana’s Head of Product, leading the company’s product strategy and product organization, including product management, design and user research. Prior to Asana, Alex was a VP of Product Management at Intuit and led QuickBooks Online. Alex was also the VP of Product at TubeMogul, which is now Adobe’s Advertising Cloud, and held positions at the Nasdaq Stock Market. Alex received his B.A. from American University and MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Wendy Pfeiffer, CIO, Nutanix

Wendy Pfeiffer is the CIO of Nutanix, where she leads the global Information Technology team and functions that support the company’s business operations and employees. Prior to Nutanix, Wendy led technology teams for industry-makers like GoPro, Yahoo!, Cisco Systems, Exodus Communications and Robert Half. Dedicated to excellence in operations and delivery while maintaining a focus on innovation, Wendy has played a key role in envisioning and delivering business technologies for the past two decades.

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