Companies everywhere are trying to adapt to the new world of work. Despite all the disruption caused by Covid-19, research from the UK and US shows that on the whole, employees find remote working a positive experience.
FleishmanHillard, a global PR and digital marketing agency conducted a study of 1,000 remote workers across two countries, in which they assessed the perspectives and experiences of using digital tools for business during the lockdown.
They found that in the UK, the percentage of full-time remote workers grew from 7% to 55% during the pandemic. In the US, 25% of employees worked from home part-time in 2018, with just 2% working exclusively from home. At the beginning of April 2020, an estimated 62% of US workers were working remotely due to the pandemic.
The research found that, overwhelmingly, workers’ experiences of technology for remote communication had been generally positive, and remote working has been a net benefit, despite its challenges.
Findings from a separate report, focusing on impediments to the productivity of remote workers found that the majority of IT support tickets submitted were related to unintuitive IT security policies preventing access, and persistent disruptions in connectivity to their organization’s network.
The data gathered from the FleishmanHillard report points to remote workers not wanting to give up the new freedoms they have gained due to the pandemic. Post Covid-19 workers hope their organizations maintain an aspect of the flexible working they have become accustomed to.
What the workers say
- Only 1 in 4 (25.6%) of workers would rate their technology experience of working remotely as better than that in the office.
- Security products are a major impediment to remote working. 58% of employees consider their impact detrimental to productivity.
- 57.5% of all workers who encountered IT issues while working remotely did not share them with the IT team.
- 62% of remote workers confess to using rogue applications for work that their IT department does not know about.
Why organizations should look to digital experience monitoring
On average employers overestimate the quality of the remote worker experience by 21% versus the self-reported scores given by the workers themselves. Adding to this gap, IT teams are already stretched, with 74.5% of organizations seeing an increase in support tickets since the beginning of the pandemic.
Currently, only one in three organizations use a dedicated experience monitoring solution to gauge their end users’ day-to-day experience. However, the 2020 lockdown has led to almost half of IT departments considering new investment in experience monitoring solutions to gain visibility.
Experience monitoring tools enable IT, teams, to proactively and reactively monitor and improve the remote working experience of their organization. More intelligent diagnostic features mean a better understanding of the problems that need to be solved. More importantly, they can also improve the employee experience by intuitively fixing issues, resulting in fewer support tickets by frustrated workers and reduced strain on IT departments.
Read the NetMotion Digital Experience Monitoring Report for more insights.
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