85,000 Ericsson Employees Still Working Remotely

In March this year, Ericsson shifted the majority of its staff to a work from home environment nearly overnight. Today, around 85,000 Ericsson employees, who are running networks, working in R&D and support functions, all regularly working from home.

In the latest episode of the Ericsson News Podcast, company President and CEO, Börje Ekholm, spoke about new social reality and how strong and reliable communication networks are more important than ever. Ekholm himself was participating in the podcast from his home in New York.

"We have about 85,000 today working from home, running Networks, R&D, support functions. So overall, we are migrating every function of the company to home. Of course there are some that cannot work from home like field engineers for example. But otherwise we migrated and it’s really thanks to a very strong IT infrastructure we have. We invested in that already before and now we can leverage that. I would say the crew we have working on our IT support have done a fabulous job of keeping the company running," Ekholm said.

Ericsson chief also discussed the importance of well built network structure in these difficult times. "For most networks traffic is up more than 25%, some of them even doubling. So we see a very sharp demand on the network and the network quality. This increase has been done without any major service degradation. So it shows the resilience of the networks. I will say it shows the criticality of the networks and the national, call it the critical national infrastructure, and I want to include communication networks here as well. But what I think is maybe more interesting than just the total increase in traffic is actually the way it has changed traffic patterns.

Speaking of expectations connected with public health uncertaintes, Ekholm didn't want to predict what to expect. He pointed out that the companies and employees need to be prepared for anything. "I think it’s better not to forecast how the pandemic will pan out and how it will look like, but I do think that we need to plan for that this ends. It will end, and our ambition is to be in a stronger competitive position once we come out of the pandemic. This means of course that we need to be flexible, we need to adjust. We need to be agile in the way we work, in the way we serve our customers, and here I do think that what we have shown by migrating 85,000 colleagues to work from home shows a great stamina in the company, and it makes me enormously proud to work in a company that can actually achieve this overnight," concluded Ekholm.