By Sreedevi Vijayagopalan, HR Business Partner, Verizon Business Group
Our Business Continuity and Event Management (BCEM) framework supports Verizon Business’ operational preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery, and has been in play since the start of the COVID-19 crisis.
To date, 99 per cent of our 130,000-strong global workforce has adopted a work from home policy. We’ve provided our colleagues with the tools to maintain their productivity. While our first path is to enable as many employees as possible to work from home, we also implemented safeguards to protect our employees on the frontline.
In the US, we have closed 70% of our stores nationwide, reduced operational hours, and we are only serving critical customer requests for our network team. For Verizon’s global customers, the company operates a global IP backbone network spanning six continents. It is built with resiliency in mind; it is one of the most connected Internet backbones in the world, offers speeds of up to 100 GB, and deploys mesh technology to enable multiple diverse paths for network traffic as required.
Performance is constantly monitored by Verizon’s five global Network Operations Centers, 24 x 7, 365. More than halfway through the second full week of large-scale working-from-home, the use of online collaboration tools such as conference calling applications continues to rise significantly, according to the latest Verizon Network Report. Week over week, there has been a 47% increase in use of collaboration tools on Verizon’s networks. The use of these applications drops sharply during weekends, indicating they are being used primarily for remote work and online learning.
Traffic using Virtual Private Networks (VPN), which allow people to create a secure connection over a public network (like the internet) to reach a private network, also continues to increase. It is up another 9% week over week and up 52% over a typical day.
In the US, Verizon’s wireless and broadband networks handled more than 218,000 terabytes of data last Monday alone. That equates to 106 million hours of streaming content, 190 billion photo uploads or 38 billion songs downloaded. The network continues to perform well.
Key Challenges Faced
We identified employees who continue to provide business-critical services to our customers, even if movement is restricted due to COVID-19. Our business teams, including technical, service, network operations, security operations, sales, change and order management are all now equipped to work from home, and are supporting customers remotely.
This was a new way of working for most of our teams. We had to scale up our infrastructure fast, to set employees up for remote working. For example, we have network operations employees who are required to go to different customer sites to build and maintain our network. We gave them personal protective equipment to protect themselves during customer visits.
In addition, at our Network Operation Center in Manila, we moved employees to remote working in a phased manner, in order to allow them to work in a safe environment as possible. We’ve also used our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) to help employees build resilience during such tough situations. EAP is also available to employees’ families. Our EAP provider has been conducting webinars and sharing information to support employees.
We recognized the importance of regular, credible, transparent communication during a crisis. We have a centralized resource page for employees and managers. Our leadership team has been highly visible and focused on supporting employees through these changes.
We shared tips for employees on working remotely, and also tips for managers on managing virtual teams. We also share health and wellness tips so that employees can stay healthy even when they are indoors. We also have leaders checking in with their teams on a regular basis to keep them informed and reassured. We’ve encouraged managers to give employees flexibility and support while they get used to this “new normal”.
Key lessons learnt
# Prepare your networks for a remote workforce.
# Implement technology that enables remote collaboration.
# Prioritize and develop a critical infrastructure plan.
# Use tools to give customers confidence and access
# Secure both physical and network access points.
# Prepare your employees to work remotely, and managers to manage virtual teams.
# Think outside the box. Our network technicians use remote technology to maintain our network. By supporting our employees, we are able to support our customers. Through this transition, we have had minimum disruption to business (in APAC).
Technology tools used to facilitate smooth collaboration between employees
We continue to use a mix of collaboration tools including Cisco WebEx, Google Hangouts and Google Meet and Google Drive to ensure that employees can stay connected.