Before the outbreak of Covid-19 businesses spoke a lot about how the workplace is becoming more flexible and connected.
There’s no doubt that remote working is becoming increasingly mainstream, with recruitment sites like Glassdoor seeing growing demand from job seekers for employers who enable them to work from home, or other locations, but often IT faces an ongoing challenge to deliver the flexibility and quality of experience that today’s workforce demands.
We take a look back at our research ‘The State of IT – The Employee Verdict’, which shows there is hunger for remote working within the UK workforce, with almost three quarters (71%) of the 2,000 UK knowledge workers we surveyed revealing they would like the option to work remotely. But what time will tell as we adapt to our current environment is what happens when the dream becomes a reality? When employees have no choice to work remotely and indeed when working remotely really does just mean ‘working from home’!
Almost half of workers don’t use the IT support service at all and more than a third (35%) admit having a problem that they did not report, losing an average of more than an hour working time a month.
These are the findings of a survey of 2,000 UK knowledge workers carried out by Opinium on behalf of Capita. Only 16% say that their current IT experience makes them feel valued, while only 38% of staff are confident using the technology they have been issued with, and 77% say better training in IT would make them more productive.
Frustration with the lack of flexible working is also evident, with only a third of people being allowed to work remotely when they wanted to, despite 71% wanting to do so. The problem is particularly acute among women, with 38% reporting that they are not allowed to work from home at all, compared with just 26% of men.
Of particular concern to employers is the attitude towards security, with more than 90% saying that security was mostly their employer’s responsibility and more than a third stating that security was not their responsibility at all.
These findings come at time when Gartner reports that many organisations are setting out to revolutionise their employees’ working lives by setting up digital workplaces.
In fact, CIO research Capita carried out last year found that 95% of organisations are either
already in the process of digital transformation or are planning it in the next 12 months.
However, this latest knowledge worker research indicates that there is a real disconnect between what organisations are setting out to deliver, and the experience their employees have in practice.
Employees have to date heard a lot about how the world of work is supposedly becoming more mobile, flexible and connected and now many of them are forced to work remotely, but are experiencing problems joining video conferences, accessing business applications and sharing files with colleagues.
Of course, this is in part because of the circumstances in which organisations found themselves having to scale up their remote working provision at pace but can also be attributed in many cases to their lack of preparedness to embrace remote working ahead of the pandemic.
Whilst Covid-19 may have forced many in to a state of remote working beyond their organisational intent, there’s no doubt that there’s still a conflict between what users expect and what employers provide when it comes to remote working. When we return to ‘business as usual’ this has to be addressed when designing ICT solutions for 2020 and beyond and will have serious implications for attracting and retaining talent.
What we can’t be certain of yet is whether this conflict will continue beyond Covid-19, and will organisations find it hard to go back to their traditional stance and reasoning against offering remote working options for their staff?
There’s no doubt however, that arguments for remote working are increasingly compelling; increased collaboration, reduced environmental impact to name but two.
But these are unusual times that call for adaptability and innovation in spades.
