About Deepak Ohlyan, Vice President – APJC, Global Facilities, Dell Technologies:
Deepak Ohlyan has been with Dell Technologies for more than 15 years and manages Dell facilities across Asia Pacific, Japan & China (APJC). In his current role, he is responsible for managing relationships with multiple business units, corporate real estate, facilities, and environmental health & safety for 50,000+ team members across large functional centers like R&D facilities, manufacturing, and sales sites. During his tenure at Dell Technologies, the facilities team has seen significant footprint expansion with development of award-winning state-of-the-art facilities that leverage cutting-edge technology to build industry-pioneering designs.
He believes in inspiring, motivating and equipping people on a greening journey for sustainable development and environmental protection and aligned to this is my focus to drive Dell’s sustainability conservation and clean energy programs. This strongly reflects in our strategies right from the design stage and managing operations to implementing novel concepts on water conservation measures and binning the plastic. The initiatives implemented at Dell have earned many notable accolades such as Golden Peacock award for sustainability, CII Green Champion Award, Green Contact Center award, LEED & IGBC certifications to name a few.
What were the some of the measures undertaken by Dell to ensure safety and workplace efficiency?
Dell Technologies has always considered itself to be a responsible corporate citizen and a “People First” organization. During the present situation, our top priority remains to ensure the safety and well-being of our team members, customers, partners and the communities in which we work and live.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Dell has established Global CCT (COVID Crisis Team) with sub teams at country level. The CCT was responsible to make rapid decisions, to strategize and mobilize resources that ensure safety and workplace efficiency. With almost 19+ months of Work from Anywhere and being more productive, this team ensured that work is now measured as output and no longer defined by place or time. Backed by data and science, a defined set of parameters and considerations were established for CCT to assess the situation:
- Site Risk Assessment: Conducting risk profiling for each office location and city to ascertain if it is safe to return. This meant determining infection rates, recovery trends, health care system, local Gov’t / Federal guidance before turning any site green.
- Phased Return: Depending on the risk profiling of a particular location and local Gov’t regulations, the team members will be prioritized for a staggered return. This meant re-purposing the office space and amenities to meet the social distancing norms and Covid appropriate behavior.
- Site Preparedness: Prepping the sites is most important aspect before re-opening them. This includes additional deep cleaning and sanitization measures, defining social distancing capacities, Covid appropriate behavior signages, maintaining adequate inventory of PPE kits and re-mobilizing vendors & manpower at the sites. Array of changes to include health screening via thermal scanners, touchless vending machines, packed food vs. live food or enabling touchless solutions for cabs
- Communication: Success of any effective change management is strong and structured communication and a leadership that plays a pivotal role in relaying it. We ensured that the communications were real-time and in alignment to Gov’t guidelines
Given the accelerated pace of transformation, what emerging technologies is the industry working with?
The recent situation has made adoption to “new normal” and “Work from Anywhere” a reality. Each company in their own way will need to embrace to this change and, the new way of work will be filled by low-touch interactions. The impact on workplace design and operations is inevitable and will be profound.
The future will be defined by providing flexible workplace design and operations to accommodate the new mix of workforce. The new workforce will be less anchored to an office but will be more between hybrid (2-3 days from office) and remote workforce. The workplace will need to be repurposed to ensure that they support this new flexible and untethered work style. Companies will need to enable the right tools, technology, and services to augment the team member experience.
Technology will no longer be a supporting capability but will be core to this transformation. The future is not far when you can imagine your day in office that starts from reserving a desk/room in office using an app, booking a parking slot online before heading to your office location, using touchless lift to reach your floor, using app to order food & reserving time slot in café, using contactless water taps and soap dispensers and using QR code based vending machines.
For facilities team, technology will continue to grow exponentially from enabling remote capabilities to managing offices using new age Environmental Monitoring System (EMS) & Building Management System (BMS) systems to deploy IoT solutions. Building information modelling systems will aid new age design with help of blueprint models, 3D designs, reduce risk and aid lean construction practices. Integrated workplace management systems will predict and help optimize energy consumption trends, equipment maintenance schedules and provide digital work order creation systems
How are companies working towards balancing sustainability with safety in the post-pandemic era?
Sustainability has accelerated by default in the current situation. Companies are strategizing right sizing of the real estate portfolio by offering more flexible working solutions to employees and monitor utilization. This strategy will aid conservation of resources to the tune of 30 – 40% annually.
The adoption of remote working overnight due to pandemic also brought newer insights to being more dynamic and fluid in real estate portfolio planning. The transformation of the work profiles will have tremendous opportunities to make lasting impact on environment by advancing sustainability, promoting work-life balance and also engaging new age or Gen-Z talent that wants flex options in their workplace.
Companies are committing to invest/source renewable energy for their energy demands. At Dell, our goal is to achieve 75% of our energy demand sourced from renewable energy resources by the year 2030. Our sustainability goals are here to stay and accelerate in post pandemic era. Interestingly, during the lockdowns, our employees learned new skills around gardening, composting, planting trees through virtual sessions and shared great stories that actually garnered more engagement and created awareness in their communities thus demonstrating the right behavior for a sustainable planet.
Can you see any elements in workplace design that will disappear?
There have been a series of revolutions in workplace designing compared to 15-20 years back. In present times, the way offices are used in a very modern setting, from removing hierarchies of walls and cubicles to incorporating workplace methodologies from the technology industry into team-based, open-plan layouts. Gone are the concepts of regular workstations spread across the entire floor, long corridor offices and corner office for execs.
The office designs will transform over time to embrace the new hybrid working culture of our employees. The office design of the future will have regular workstations as a small percentage of the workforce and the new designs will bring more collaborative space, reservable workspace, quite rooms enabled with technology to enable lighting, projection, air-con on demand. Companies will see underutilisation of common resources such as onsite fitness center, play arenas etc. Activities such as new hire onboarding, orientation training, talent acquisition, etc. will happen virtually and these spaces will be repurposed over time.
On technical front, forward-looking workplace design will highlight the role of mechanical systems more than before. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of a sophisticated approach to ventilation and state-of-the-art HVAC systems to combat any airborne diseases. Clean air will need to be maintained to the highest standards and the entire workplace ecosystem will need to be re-imagined to adapt to the new norms of flexible working.