Dell EMC World 2017: Your Workforce Is Changing Whether You Like It Or Not
Dell EMC World 2017: The needs of employees are changing and they’re not afraid to let you know about it
A demanding bunch
However, the challenge for businesses is that the benefits of modern technologies, combined with the quality of devices and services available in our personal lives, means employees are now demanding more from their professional lives.
“The reason we are seeing the workforce transform is because people care about technology in their workforce more than ever before,” said Samuel Burd, executive vice president of the client product group at Dell in an interview with Silicon.
“If you turn the clock back five or eight years, you got whatever technology you were going to get and you needed to be happy with that. You look at it now, people want devices for the way they work and if they don’t get great technology they look [for work] elsewhere.”
Burd cited a recent Dell study which found that 82 percent of millennials said the quality of workplace tech would influence their decision whether or not to accept a job and 42 percent would be willing to quit their job over sub-standard tech.
“We are seeing business rethink their approach,” Burd added. Businesses are now more willing to invest significantly in workplace technologies to empower their employees, which he described as “a huge shift from what we saw five or eight years ago”.
But, of course, it’s not quite as simple as simply buying the best tech as it has to be matched up to the specific needs of the employees.
“You can imagine that a management consultant based out of New York City or London serving global customers will have one set of needs like connectivity, mobility, perhaps high resolution and a lot of data,” explained Bert Park, general manager of global software and peripherals in Dell’s operations and client solutions group.
“Whereas a teacher based in a single location serving the needs of students in the classroom will have very different needs. It’s about thinking through what the requirements are, what the needs you’re trying to fulfil are.”
One way Dell is addressing the issue is through the global rollout of PC as a Service, which combines modern Dell PC’s with software, end-to-end services and support to help meet the growing demand for modern hardware as businesses realise the productivity benefits it offers.
As Michael Dell explained, it also highlights the company’s future commitment to the PC market: “To make it extremely clear, the PC business remains core to our mission and our strategy. Clearly what Dell Technologies does is far beyond just the PC, but the PC is still very important to our customers and to us. It’s how work gets done.
“One of the things that customers have figured out is that it really doesn’t make sense to give the people who work in your company the lowest cost computer. If you want to make people inside your company productive, you actually want to give them great tools so you can inspire their creativity.”
And it’s showing in terms of financials, as Dell’s PC division is growing, generating increasing revenues and is set to have achieved 18 quarters of market share growth in a row at the end of this current quarter.
So, despite most of the talk being centred around hybrid cloud, software-defined networks and data centre modernisation, Dell is still very much committed to making room for its range of devices.
