The Key to Shared Resilience

Nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic and much of the way we live, work, and connect has been radically transformed. Reflecting on this year’s challenges, I sat down with other technology leaders during The Economist Innovation@Work event to discuss how companies have navigated Morale and Motivation in the New Normal.

My key observations were:

1.      Global companies must be attuned to the unique and shifting needs of their employees.

2.      Putting people and purpose first is paramount to building a resilient culture.

3.      Leaders lead – a strong leadership network across the company becomes critical in times of change.

Due to the varying rates of community spread and vastly different government response protocols, the pandemic forced many global companies to reimagine their approach to employee communications. At AMD, we really leaned on our site leaders to provide localized communications addressing the unique priorities or “careabouts” of staff in specific offices and global regions. We also understood the importance of continuing a two-way dialogue around employee needs as the pandemic endured. We typically survey employees annually, however during the pandemic we rolled out “burst surveys” to check in on the physical and mental well-being of our staff. We found this particularly helpful in remaining fluid during the rapid shift in the way we work. And this effort paid off – our recent Employee Engagement Survey scores reached the highest level in our company history.

During the rapid transition to remote work, countless companies struggled to keep employees engaged in the virtual world. This abrupt shift demonstrated the importance of not only fostering a healthy workplace culture, but also the critical need to protect it. A huge piece of the engagement puzzle at AMD has been our Employee Resource Groups. Our ERGs have served as the backbone of our culture, allowing employees to embrace their commonalities and differences, and even facilitate difficult conversations about social issues within our broader employee community. We’ve also encouraged our ERGs to collaborate on programming for special occasions like International Women’s Day or Black History Month.

As we looked for ways to continue to support our employees, the role of leaders – including executives, site leads, heads of ERGs and people managers – has dramatically shifted during the pandemic. There has been no blueprint to navigate this unprecedented environment, therefore leaders need to be comfortable using common sense to make decisions that ensure employee continuity and consistency. We worked to equip our leaders with the necessary tools and resources to facilitate a variety of conversations – from virtual professional development to the importance of mental health. As employers, we have an incredibly important responsibility to provide a sense of stability and trust, even amid the turbulence and uncertainties of pandemic life.

While we continue to innovate, collaborate, and deliver industry-leading technologies to our partners and customers, we also have employees working and parenting full-time, reckoning with broader societal issues, and navigating the challenges of the pandemic itself. To help support our people and their families, AMD expanded our benefits regarding back-up care services for kids or elderly family members. We added global pandemic leave that allows employees to take paid time off to care for themselves or a family member. We also provided additional allowances for technology used by a dependent child for remote learning and for home office purchases to ensure everyone felt supported outside of AMD’s physical offices.

Throughout all of this, AMD’s culture has proven to be more resilient than we ever anticipated it would need to be — and every bit of this can be attributed to the AMD employees who share a common purpose to build the best high-performance computing products in the world. During this unprecedented time our teams have developed technology that has helped advance genome science, accelerate drug discovery, map the universe, aid COVID-19 research, raise standards of technical education in schools and colleges.

Even as a we edge toward a return to normalcy, it’s important that we continue to apply these learnings to drive and inspire a more engaged, healthy, and resilient workforce.