Employers and employees increasingly see IT and user experience as key to employee satisfaction and productivity, however, confidence in support services is low, with only 10% reporting that they receive proactive service.
Significant numbers of users are avoiding the support service when they have problems and across the workforce employees are losing more than an hours of working time each month to issues.
Despite the lack of confidence in the IT service, the demand for flexible working which IT enables is rising. However there is an additional frustration as a significant percentage of workers, particularly women in the public sector, are denied the opportunity to work from home at all.
Overall, organisations must look carefully at how they manage and measure the delivery of IT services to users in order to bring these in line with the expectations of an increasingly digitally aware and entitled workforce. Culturally, remote working is a more realistic prospect in some industries than others. Private sector workers are more likely to be allowed to do so than those in the public sector.
In the long run, an inability to offer remote working could leave an organisation watching some of its best employees heading for the exit. Workers state loud and clear in this report that the user experience needs to evolve with the shift to remote working. Employers must take an interest in the quality of the IT experience and fix issues as they are raised.
1 UK productivity was calculated using the below:
Monthly hours impacted by IT problems =1.22 Multiplied by average UK wage (£14.11) =£17.21 £17.21 multiplied by number of months a year (12) =£206.57 £206.57 multiplied by number of UK knowledge workers (19,632,000) = IT problems cost the UK £4,055,382,240 in lost productivity every year
*Average UK hourly wage calculated by: Average UK monthly earnings (£2,465.66) divided by average UK working hours (174.63) =£14.11 UK average hourly wage is £14.11
*Average UK monthly earnings calculated by: Median full-time weekly earnings =£569 569 multiplied by number of weeks in a year (52) =£29,588 29,588 divided by number of months in a year (12) =£2,465.66 £2,465.66 is UK average monthly earnings
*Average UK working hours calculated by: Average UK weekly working hours =40.3 40.3 multiplied by number of weeks in a year (52) =2095.6 2095.6 divided by number of months in a year (12) =174.63 174.63 is UK average monthly working hours
Statistics taken from the below:
Median full-time weekly earnings Average number of working hours a month UK working population 60% of UK working population are knowledge workers
2 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/government-staff-lost-more-than-600-laptops-phones-and-usbs-in-last-four-years_uk_5acf364ae4b064876777471a?guccounter=2