YouGov survey highlights positives of home working

YouGov survey highlights positives of home working

Working from home is more popular than ever before, with numerous companies of all sizes allowing their employees increasing degrees of flexibility when it comes to the location from which they choose to work, a YouGov survey has reported.

Helping this trend is the evolution of technology, such as smartphones, cloud computing and VoIP, which allow staff members based outside the office to have a direct, reliable and fast line of communication to their office-based colleagues and clients around the world.

According to the new YouGov survey commissioned by Citrix and carried out amongst small organisations in the UK and across the globe, pressure is rising for employers to roll out flexible working strategies. The majority of smaller firms – 58 per cent – are taking steps in the right direction by supporting the use of smart devices - both personal and company-owned – for work related tasks.

There are many reasons why firms are feeling growing pressure to allow employees to work remotely, including environmental pressure relating to lowering the corporate carbon footprint. Another pressure point is the push towards the adoption of a more family-friendly approach and allowing parents to tailor their working days around their families.

Twenty-five per cent of companies surveyed said that they felt under more pressure to roll out flexible working than five years ago, with just two per cent reporting that they felt less pressure. They also confirmed that the pressure was coming from staff members across every department of the organisation, instead of from just sales or IT support departments, as has been the case in the past. Thanks to technology such as advanced cloud-based collaboration tools, the barriers that prevented a company-wide adoption of remote working in the past are fast being overcome.

Andrew Millard, senior director marketing, EMEA, online services division at Citrix, told PublicService.co.uk that many staff members were now keen to use their own personal communication devices such as smartphones for both work and home life, as using one device made their lives less complicated. Whilst 42 per cent of survey respondents confirmed that they would like just one device, just 21 per cent said that they would rather have a work device and a home device, believing the work-related one to offer better functionality.

Fifty per cent of the firms surveyed for the report said that they were achieving “measurable productivity gains of up to 30 per cent”, as a result of implementing flexible working, reported the publication, with a further 14 per cent of firms achieving even more gains. Just 14 per cent of firms reported that they were not noticing any gains, a drop by half from the number recorded in a similar survey carried out in 2011.

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