CEO Antonio Neri shares the latest on HPE’s COVID-19 response

The impact of COVID-19 feels more acute with each passing day. I have been particularly struck watching the devastation across Spain and Italy.  As our team members know, while I was born in Argentina, I am the son of Sicilians, and the majority of my family lives in Italy.  They have already lived through very challenging times.  My great grandmother lost six sons during the Spanish Flu in 1918, and my grandfather fought in two world wars.  But they were resilient.  As I hear the personal stories from HPE team members around the globe, I am impressed by their strength and determination – and I grow even more confident that we, too, will be resilient.

My confidence is also driven by the fact that we have people and processes in place to protect our teams and emerge from this time of global uncertainty on sound business footing. We continue to use our response framework as a guide: assessing developments, addressing the ways we can help our team members, customers, partners and communities, and adapting for the future as the world recovers and rebuilds.

We have now activated crisis management teams in every country in which we operate. With more countries implementing and extending “stay at home” orders, we continue to ask all team members to work from home until further notice. I have been impressed by the productivity shown by all our team members despite the change in their working environment. For example, our Executive Briefing Centers are now hosting virtual customer and partner briefings—a process they’ve built collaboratively over the last two weeks. This week, the team has tripled the number of virtual engagements scheduled across our centers, and they expect that to continue to increase.

As I hear the personal stories from HPE team members around the globe, I am impressed by their strength and determination

While we ask all our team members to continue to work from home, a small number of team members performing mission-critical roles remains on site with customers, including those assisting with the setup of pop-up hospitals and healthcare facilities.  In addition, a very limited number of team members performing essential activities to maintain minimum business operations is able to volunteer to work; it’s entirely their choice, and we’re equally supportive of those who choose to stay home.

I am impressed by how our team members have rallied together during this difficult period – and I’m seeing the same among my leaders. Yesterday, I joined a virtual roundtable with fellow CEOs in which we shared best practices in our responding to COVID-19 and discussed strategies for recovery.  During the discussion, the moderator asked how we’ve managed conflict among stakeholders during this crisis.  If there is one major observation I’ve had through this period, it’s that we haven’t faced many conflicts in decision making. We are grounded in doing what’s right for the health and safety of our team members, customers and partners, and decisions are fairly easy when evaluated against one guiding principle.

This situation isn’t easy, but I am incredibly proud of the focus and optimism of the people of HPE. We will get through this together, demonstrating our resilience as we look forward to better times ahead.

For more information on HPE’s response to COVID-19, please visit the HPE Newsroom.