While we’ve highlighted our clients’ success stories in our Remote Work Tales, here we believe we are writing about somebody else.
Citrix did a poll of 2,000 US office workers currently working from home due to the coronavirus. Workers responded April 2-14 to questions about their work-from-home setups, and also how it was going.
According to Citrix, 83% said their organizations were either “completely ready” or “fairly ready” to have employees start fully working from home.
But it’s not clear employees themselves were ready.
- Only 34 percent of the workers surveyed said they were taking a shower every day.
- Forty-one percent said they had made “awkward noises” during meetings when they thought they were muted.
- Forty-four percent said they’d accidentally turned on their video during a meeting without realizing it.
- Of the 44 percent above, about 325 of them (per the survey) were in the bathroom when they joined a meeting via video accidentally. Some may have been doing some cleaning, but others apparently were not.
- However, 29 percent did say they were working in the bathroom for quiet and privacy.
In all seriousness, respondents also cited technology challenges they faced in transitioning to working from home. Those challenges included slow home broadband, slow Wi-Fi, an inability to access all the applications needed to work, and a slow VPN connection.
Respondents also disliked having to take more steps to log in securely, including multiple passwords and multi-factor authentication. However these steps are necessary when workers access company files outside the security-controlled corporate network.
It’s unclear after six weeks of social distancing how extensively workers will continue working from home. The poll results did not shed any light on the future.
Between 32 and 37 percent each said:
- They expected their companies to “be more relaxed” about remote working and allow it “more regularly.”
- They expected to be working from home more
– Or –
- They were “keen” to get back to the office to work, and
- They thought their colleagues also were eager to return to the office.
You can read more about the poll here. And if your organization’s team has suffered technology issues during this work-from-home period, give us a call. We can help you correct those problems.