iTWire - Remote work has increased productivity, led to more app use: survey

Tuesday, 15 December 2020 09:20

Remote work has increased productivity, led to more app use: survey

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

A survey of 1000 Australians — all so-called knowledge workers — during the year to October, has found that the use of workplace apps has increased significantly, with 69% using between 3 and 10 apps, while 17% had to juggle with more than 10.

Additionally, more than half (53%) of those surveyed felt they had increased their productivity since going to remote work, 77% found it easy to adapt, and more than four-fifths (82%) felt empowered by the tech they used. This was an increase from 68% which was noted in a survey prior to the pandemic.

But on the downside, those surveyed said a key pain point was that the increased use of apps meant fragmentation of work. The average time spent switching between apps was put at 22 minutes a day, which works out to two hours a week or 95 hours (or 12 working days) annually.

The survey, the results of which were issued under the name The Remote Work Tech Effect, was conducted by Honeycomb Strategy on behalf of communications platform Slack in October 2020 and included only workers from organisations that had more than 100 workers.

A part of the results of this survey were benchmarked against a survey on working habits and the way teams work together carried out by the same organisation in January, before the pandemic hit.

Some other findings also backed up the claim that working remotely had its positives:

Again, this has been seen overwhelmingly as a positive change among those surveyed:

• sixty-six percent of knowledge workers said they believed the rapid adoption of tech had positively impacted their organisations and their industries;
• thirty-four percent felt they were making more effective use of technology for work; and,
• twenty-nine percent believed they had become more tech savvy in their work.

Measured against the January study, the survey listed the following figures:

• eighty-four percent believed technology made it easier to communicate with both internal and external teams (up from 75% and 77% respectively);
• eighty-six percent believed technology had made it easier for them to communicate with colleagues working in other geographic locations (up from 79%); and,
• eighty-three percent believed technology enabled better collaboration (up from 74%).

More than half of those surveyed said their biggest frustration was being unable to find documents or information needed for their work. And 68% said they could function better with easier access to information, with more than 50% saying they could even do their boss's work if they had access to the same information as this individual.

The location of information on digital platforms was a source of annoyance to 59% who said what they needed was stored in too many places across the organisation.

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