In a major deep dive into the new digital workplace post-COVID, research from 1E has discovered that remote workers have taken significant productivity hit during the past few months. The research differs to other studies, in that 1E spoke to hands-on employees during the pandemic rather than to managers. In contrast, a study reported by the BBC shows that remote work productivity increased by 13 percent during the lockdown.
The research shows that while most employees are working remotely and want it to be business as usual, it is clear that enterprises are still not sufficiently robust to address the issues that stem from remote work. Here the research shows huge gaps in IT infrastructure that need to be plugged to make the ‘work from anywhere’ future a reality and deliver an improved employee experiences outside the office walls.
A key finding from the study is that although there are many articles saying productivity has risen due to remote work, the findings from 1E show that many U.S. businesses have taken a huge productivity hit as 18 million remote employees have been left unable to work due to IT disruption.
The interviews with personnel find that .U.S knowledge workers (98 percent) care about the performance of their device as they have become completely dependent on it; however, 53 percent of respondents said their device runs slower outside the office walls. In addition, 48 percent cite this as a top three issue affecting their productivity.
Further affecting employee productivity are service desk wait times. With this, 72 percent are waiting hours, days and even weeks for device issues to be fixed. It follow that 68 percent of respondents said that their work is impacted by the remediation process.
In support of its latest research, 1E has announced its virtual ‘Work From Anywhere Enterprise Conference 2020′ with ServiceNow, Forrester, NTT Data, and Dion Hinchcliffe of Constellation Research. Each company will address the conference all set to appear for keynotes across July 29 & 30.
