Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, employees worldwide had to resort to work from home. Soon after, the debate about remote working began – Is a remote workforce sustainable? Is productivity impacted? Which remote tools help boost productivity? Splashtop surveyed employees worldwide to find out.
Executive Summary
In May 2020, Splashtop conducted the Work-From-Home Survey to find out how professionals across industries had transitioned to working remotely during COVID-19. The following topics were covered in the survey:
- Working from home before COVID-19
- The productivity of working from home vs in the office
- Tools that help employees be productive while working from home
- Use cases of how the tools are used
- Respondents’ opinion on the future of remote work
Eight hundred and seventy (870) individuals worldwide, from various industries, took the survey.
It is interesting to note that up until recently, working from home was an option mainly in the IT industry. It was uncommon for television broadcasting stations, game developers, video producers, architects, faculty members, hospital staff, and professionals in many other
industries to work remotely. That’s in part because the licensed software applications they work with consume a lot of CPU resources and storage, and are therefore housed on physical computers in an office. They cannot be replicated easily. For security purposes, they prefer not
to have computers taken off premises when they contain proprietary content, source code, or medical records. So for industries with such particular needs, remote access solutions are setting a new trend. Continue reading to learn more about our findings.
During COVID-19, along with collaboration and communication tools, remote access and remote support solutions saw a significant spike in individual professionals and organizations alike, requesting remote access to enable their business continuity plans from home. Remote access solutions enable professionals to remotely access their work computers and carry out their tasks in real-time. Not only can IT professionals write code and provide technical support but video producers can edit videos, architects can draw up 3D models, game
developers can test builds, doctors can access patient records, students can access lab computers, all from anywhere using any device. For professionals in these fields, working from home has not been the norm until today because the ‘heavy’ licensed applications they use are
not cloud-based and still follow the on-premise model, which is not easy to replicate. With remote access solutions, the possibilities of remote work and study are endless!
Key Insights and Statistics from Survey Results
- Organizations across all industries have successfully implemented their business continuity plans from home. This trend is possible because of the availability of new and improved technology which enables professionals in various fields to continue executing
their tasks remotely.
Survey result: Respondents included professionals from IT (26%), Education (18%), Healthcare (7%), Architecture & Design (5%), Media & Entertainment (5%), Finance (4%), Retail (4%), and many other industries (31%). Almost all of them were now working from home. - Before COVID-19 a vast majority of the group had never or rarely worked from home. This depicts the challenge that organizations have had to deal with during COVID-19. They had to enable an entire workforce to work from home, almost overnight. With
employees never or hardly ever working from home before, organizations lacked the infrastructure for long term work from home, and on a large scale. New-age software solutions have made it possible for companies and institutions to set up a remote
workforce effectively and quickly.
Survey result: Before COVID-19, 36.6% had never worked from home, 34.1% had rarely worked remotely, 21.5% had frequently worked remotely, and 7.8% were remote workers. - Even though most employees had hardly ever worked from home, companies and employees alike experienced higher productivity while working from home. This is largely because of employees having the right collaboration, team management, project
management, and remote access tools in place to effectively work from home.
Survey result: 40.4% were more productive from home, 39.5% were equally productive as in the office, and only 20.1% were less productive. - In addition to collaboration and communications tools, remote access and support tools have enabled professionals across various roles and industries to work remotely. They can now access and/or support workstations or lab computers from home as if they were sitting right in front of it. This capability has made it possible for organizations to virtualize offices and schools. Employees, students, faculty, continue their tasks with secure access to all the offices’/schools’ computer resources.Survey result: 75% of the respondents use remote access solutions to work from home
- Organizations and employees today prefer remote access software to traditional VPN based solutions to remote into their workstations. VPN is not easily scalable and not well suited for entire workforces working remotely.
Survey result: 75% of the respondents use a remote access solution, of which less than 16% use VPN based solutions, to remotely access computer resources, facilitate remote learning, remotely support devices, and for the convenience of being able to work from anywhere and any device. - Organizations have seen an unexpected productivity increase with decreased operating and travel costs, along with increased employee satisfaction. It’s no wonder that companies like Twitter and Square have made remote work options permanent, along
with Facebook, Google, and Microsoft announcing work from home as a long term option.
However, it seems like most organizations are still weighing their options as the situation evolves before announcing a formal decision. It remains to be seen if COVID-19 will prove to be a catalyst for a significant global change in what has been an ‘office’ up
until today.
Survey result: Almost 75% of the respondents felt like their company might be more open to working from home, of which 28% think that it might also be the new normal. However, 68% said that their organization has not announced a formal decision
regarding the future of work from home.
Work-From-Home Solutions in Toronto
NUMENTIS helps organizations re-tool and configure their operations for remote access and telecommuting. Our IT solutions team in Toronto also monitors networks and devices in real time to minimize the risk of cybertattack. Call us today to find out how we can help you resolve the little problems that reduce your employees’ productivity. NUMENTIS is an authorized partner of Splashtop.
