For the past decade, companies have focused heavily on improving the customer experience to build customer loyalty and expand business. But the global COVID-19 pandemic shed light on another need: investing in employee experience, which has undergone significant changes with remote work.

The employee experience is a fundamental part of a good customer experience, according to PJ Hough (pictured, right), executive vice president and chief product officer at the digital workspace platform Citrix Systems Inc.

“We’ve been doing some research … that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job,” Hough said. “One of the areas where companies have either succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office.”

A successful strategy depends on a number of factors, such as the devices, the bandwidth and the quality of the services the workforce is using, according to Maribel Lopez (pictured, right), founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. “The employee experience had always lagged [behind] the customer experience, and now we’re trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level,” she said.

Hough and Lopez spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed how companies can do better in this “work-from-home” time, the importance of ensuring security in a remote workspace, and the opportunity for data analysis in that environment. (* Disclosure below.)

The workspace is the starting point

To improve employee experience and therefore their productivity, the critical pieces of technology that Citrix customers leverage first are those necessary for an adequate workspace.

“The application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader … and includes web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service-based applications, etc., as well as there are mobile applications,” Hough said. “And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that’s the journey that we’ve been on as a company.”

When taking advantage of these technologies, it is important to rethink what the experience will mean for employees, according to Lopez. The ideal workspace for one may look very different than for others, and it may be a combination of different technologies, she added.

“I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they’re creating … a workspace,” Lopez states. “You can’t have private information, personal identifiable information on someone’s home device. So, I think we’re really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means.”

Security is a critical factor

In addition to bringing technical challenges, the transformations in the way of working resulting from COVID-19 have brought great security concerns to companies.

“The area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on a day-to-day basis,” Hough said. “That’s really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure.”

The approaches in this regard are diverse. “One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you’ve given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint, and then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic and you can secure access to the applications on the back end,” Hough explained.

But many enterprises have relied on employees using personally owned devices.

“This where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix — where we’ve moved the security boundary from the physical device to the workspace itself to the experience — really allow you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees,” Hough said.

Many companies have also relied on VPN as a one-size solution, which is a mistake, according to Lopez.

“VPN isn’t enough,” she said. “If you’ve given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization.”

Security needs to be a “layer cake” or what is called a “Jenga tower,” Lopez pointed out.

“Basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack, you have to secure at the device layer, you have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud,” she explained. “Organizations that are really serious about this are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage. (* Disclosure: This segment was sponsored by Citrix Systems Inc. Neither Citrix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE