Creative Ideas at Work Can Play a Big Part in Difficult Times

In the blink of an eye, we entered into a new, virtual reality, and the rapidly shifting landscape is testing us in ways we never could have imagined.

Our employees are stepping up and showing their best attributes. They’ve been sharply focused on ensuring our customers’ needs are met while also being supportive—even when they can’t be in a room together. At Cadence, we understand that our employees are the core of our success, and they absolutely embody what we call the “One Cadence—One Team” mentality. In fact, we’ve been named one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For 6 years in a row because we appreciate our employees and the valuable work they do.

The shelter-in-place mandates have forced us to recalibrate how we manage, communicate, and reach our colleagues and customers to ensure business continuity and continued growth. To find the silver lining, I’m taking this time to better understand our customers and colleagues, listening and connecting in new ways so that we can rapidly respond and create cutting-edge solutions to customers’ challenges. I can say I’ve learned a lot over these past several weeks, and I’ve got some thoughts on how we can use this crisis to carve out a path forward.

Adapting to Customer Needs

Leading a global sales organization comes with its trials in normal circumstances, but we’re facing additional challenges when it comes to helping our colleagues and customers. It’s imperative to connect with employees and customers regularly to ensure they feel like the virtual communication doors are wide open. It’s been useful to reevaluate how much I communicate with both my direct team members and the larger organization, and it’s been an eye-opening exercise to try to strike the right balance.

To help us acclimate to this new reality and ensure business continuity, our IT team has been hard at work, tackling technical challenges and creating flexible solutions to meet, and even exceed, customer needs while we’re all remote. This includes providing collaboration tools and making more trainings readily and broadly available. The Cadence IT team has been proactive in preparing for surges in remote work and has built new solutions quickly to ensure we have strong VPN connectivity to accommodate the bandwidth necessary to tackle business challenges.

Being attentive and proactive so we can rapidly support our customers’ needs is at the top of our list during this time. With a digital-first mindset, we’re continuously evolving to ensure that we’ve deployed the best methods to enable our customers to run their businesses uninterrupted, as much as possible. We have revamped our Cadence Support Portal to make it better than ever before, providing a comprehensive knowledgebase to get users ramped up quickly and easily with the ability to address design needs faster, study new trends and features, and learn through a variety of resources. Additionally, we’ve set up virtual “drop-in” hours for customers and launched a new Cadence Support App, which delivers content and technical training videos directly onto their mobile devices.

Our investment in customer support has shown early success, with online support usage up significantly. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from customers who are appreciative of our proactive approach. Cadence prioritizes our customers, and we intend to listen, collaborate, and invest in more ways to ease support.

Leading with Empathy

We need to give employees the freedom to deal with this situation in ways that work best for them and let them work in whatever manner ensures they are the most productive while having to tend to their home responsibilities.

In addition to helping employees during this unprecedented time, we can lead by looking for ways to support local organizations on the front lines of this pandemic. This can get teams working toward a shared goal that will not only help those in need, but also bring everyone that feeling of connection because they’ve made a difference. Cadence is participating firsthand by directly donating to non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting the spread of the virus. We are also doubling our employee charitable giving matching this year, letting employees increase the impact of their own giving efforts. I encourage you to check with your respective HR teams to explore active company initiatives.

Because we can’t possibly know everyone’s unique personal situation at this time, I’m also challenging everyone within my organization to look for ways to help, encourage, and support their coworkers and community—helping brings out the best in people and builds on the One Cadence—One Team spirit.

Moving Forward

It’s not unreasonable to try to inject a bit of fun into your team meetings. Ideas can include themed video meetings, happy hours, and lunch breaks. This might seem like a small thing, but these things do go a long way when it comes to morale boosting while remote. Take that much-needed break to reconnect, refresh, and enjoy working together solving problems in this new environment.

Another way to make the best of this situation is to continue to encourage healthy professional growth during this time. Bringing your team together and allowing them to discuss goals or aspirations, while keeping the long-term goal of getting back into the office in mind is a great way to encourage your team. People can then envision a future that isn’t consumed by the day’s news and one in which they are able to get back to normal and be back in the office with their teams, working toward a common goal of making our customers successful.

Pulling Together

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach or solution for managers and businesses to deal with a major shift like this. That is obvious when you take a quick look at what others in the industry are doing. I think the best way to proceed is to understand your team and your customers and to adapt the best you can to meet their needs.

In the end, I’ll continue to do my part to improve our One Cadence—One Team spirit and ensure our employees are supported and that we have a path forward by making our customers successful.

Let’s all come back stronger and better than ever. I hope everyone stays safe!