Defining a New Normal for Hitachi Vantara’s Workplace Culture

By Hubert Yoshida posted 10-23-2020 00:03

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2020 has been a challenging year for all of us, but especially so for Information Technology at Hitachi Vantara, and there is still a few months to go. First was the merger with Hitachi Consulting which nearly doubled the size of Hitachi Vantara and brought in many new business systems, then there was the pandemic which changed the way everyone works and communicates, and the appointment of a new CIO, Tim Langley-Hawthorne and a new CEO, Gajen Kandia.

The new CIO, Mr. Langley-Hawthorne, came in at the beginning of the year and faced all these challenges head on. He was interviewed on how he accomplished this by Sara Castellanos, of the Wall Street Journal. Realizing that working remotely due to the pandemic can feel isolating he focused on workplace collaboration and productivity, encouraging employees to learn new skills, communicate in different ways and experiment with new technologies that improve virtual collaboration.

One of the ways he has tried to keep employees engaged is to encourage them to learn new professional skills in the time they would have spent commuting to the office. Since March, his team has collectively received about 80 certifications in technologies ranging from software tools to branches of artificial intelligence such as machine learning and natural language processing. That is up from five certifications obtained by his team between September 2019 and February 2020.

The leaders in his team set the example. Sada Iyer, vice president of employee and shared platforms at Hitachi Vantara, obtained two certifications related to Kubernetes over the summer. Mr. Iyer says that he usually does one certification a year, but he has had time to do more since working remotely has saved him commute time.

Gartner reported in its 2018 Shifting Skills Survey that 70% of employees haven’t mastered the skills they need for their jobs today, and 80% said they lack both the skills they need both for their current and future roles. HR leaders agree. A study by Wiley Education Services and Future Workplace found 64% of the HR leaders said there is a skills gap in their company, up from 52% in 2018. This is especially true in information technology as we absorb new technologies like, containers, cyber security, AI, Data Ops, and Dev Ops, etc.

Jeremy Walsh, VP of enterprise learning solutions at Wiley Education Services, in a statement called on companies to “build talent versus simply buying talent” in order to address this skills shortage gap. Encouraging employees to obtain certifications is a great way to do this. Mr. Iyer encourages his team to post their certifications on Microsoft Teams where they can get recognition and encouragement and others can identify what skill sets are available and are in turn inspired to add to their skill sets. Certified IT professionals benefit by having a third-party validated reference, leading to a better industry reputation, higher-quality work and, ultimately, more opportunities.

Working remotely has also had its advantages in speeding up projects. One of the projects was the consolidation of HR systems with the merger of Hitachi Consulting and Hitachi Vantara. Many people thought that the need to work remotely due to the pandemic would delay the project since these systems required input from so many countries and travel was restricted. But the planning and high-level design was completed in about four months, a bit faster than usual because employees saved time on traveling and several weeks’ worth of in-person meetings. Working remotely may become a preferred approach on future projects and may be the new normal as long as we can overcome the challenges of isolation.

Mr. Mr. Langley-Hawthorne, and the leadership team at Hitachi Vantara are acutely aware of this and are finding ways to develop a new normal that encourages our employees to be more engaged and enthused and more valued.

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