50%+ of our office seats are going remote, say majority of surveyed Register readers. Hi security, bye on-prem
- Reference: 1597910769
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/20/new_normal_reader_research/
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We surveyed a few hundred IT decision makers last month on their priorities and projects in light of the COVID-19 outbreak disrupting society and business, and here are our main takeaways. Just over one in two respondents, or 54 per cent, said at least half of their seats are going remote, with North America (NA) leading the charge, which may be linked to the US government's handling of the pandemic.
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The [2]larger orgs were over-represented here , with 71 per cent of 1,000-plus-staffed company respondents seeing over half of their seats located outside of an office. That dropped to 67 per cent for companies with fewer than 250 workers and 61 per cent for SMBs with 251 to 1,000 employees. This is, we reckon, because larger businesses have the resources and infrastructure to manage remote workers, and smaller outfits can be fast-moving and flexible.
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Just 23 per cent of respondents said they saw a return to normal office working, with a slight rise to 24 per cent by those readers from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) geographies. Everyone else pretty much accepts the new normal of a spread-out workforce.
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There was a much greater disparity when it came to larger firms versus the smaller outfits on this point. Just 11 per cent of those making IT decisions in 1,000-plus companies saw a return to "normality" for office workers, which increased to 36 per cent for those working at firms staffed with fewer than 250 people.
This makes sense in the context of larger companies having higher office-related overheads, such as land leases. For example, [5]during HPE's Q2 2020 , the first accounting period showing some of the impact of the pandemic, the firm said it would realise a whopping $1bn in savings from clawing back cash it spends on keeping its staffs' desks firmly plonked on an air-conditioned, carpet-tiled floor.
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Career tip: switch to security
Another big takeaway is that in the post-lockdown world, everyone we surveyed has become laser-focused on one thing: security. We're picturing systems to protect information exchanged by staff working from their kitchen tables and spare bedrooms, out of immediate or obvious reach of IT. Technology to lock down access so that if a remote worker's login is compromised, the damage that can be done is contained. And defenses that take into account the much larger network perimeter as a result of a dispersed workforce: just because someone has an internal IP address doesn't mean they sat at a machine in an office having gone through physical security at the door. They're logged in remotely, via a VPN, and they could be anyone.
In both the short term and longer term, the largest proportion of decision makers – 27 per cent – placed security as their top priority, understandably so. Even code-hosting biz GitLab has not been immune to the security pitfalls posed by working from home. [7]In May , it saw one in five of its work-from-home staff happily fall for a phishing lure set by its own in-house pentesters. (Bear in mind that this is much better than industry averages.)
The next short-term priority for respondents are the new business processes firms must inevitably put into place (17 per cent) and end-user hardware/software (15 per cent). In [8]the longer term , home workers' kit gets a lot less attention: just seven per cent of our respondents saw it as a priority beyond the immediate future.
And although on-premises kit has been shoved to the back burner both in the near and longer term – [9]as evidenced by the increase in cloud spend from $185.2bn in 2018 to $233bn in 2019 – 14 per cent of our respondents were looking at hybrid gear as a priority over the longer term to bridge the gap between public and private.
On-premises gear, overwhelmingly, has seen the collective back of our respondents turned on it. 38 per cent of respondents have "significantly deprioritised" on-prem, again chiming in with [10]IDC's new cloud figures . That leapt up to 47 per cent for respondents from companies with more than 1,000 workers.
The future is not just remote, it seems, it's who's got the remote control? ®
Sample size: 346 respondents, contacted and surveyed globally in July 2020. Full slides are [11]available here as a PDF.
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_4.png
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_5.png
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_2.png
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_3.png
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/22/hpe_q2_2020/
[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_6.png
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/21/gitlab_phishing_pentest/
[8] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_slide_7.png
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/19/idc_semiannual_public_cloud_services_tracker_h2_2019/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/19/idc_semiannual_public_cloud_services_tracker_h2_2019/
[11] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/register_research_july2020.pdf
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Not here
I think there'll be an element of this in a number of organisations of a certain type ... variants of:
- I can't see people so I bet they aren't working
- We've paid for this expensive office so we're damn well going to use it
- I know we sell remote working technology, but that's for our customers not us.
Re: Not here
"I know we sell remote working technology, but that's for our customers not us."
So common in IT.
Re: Not here
Thankfully the MSP I work for fully ingests its own shit before foisting it on our customer base.
Maybe we're an outlier?
It is nice when pitching a product at a customer that I can just say "here is how we do it...", I'm not in sales but that does make the sell very very easy.
Sounds right to me
Local Gov - I've been out the office since early March not really expecting to go back ever. At least not full time.
We're looking to close buildings, especially those that are being leased, to save money. Local Gov has overspent massively to deal with Covid (if you're wondering why, it was your local council that looked after those vulnerable people who were/are sheilding not feckin Boris) and will need to claw back money any way they can since it's unlikely there will be any sort of central gov bail out.
I rather like the current situation
Not COVID, of course, but freelancing from home. Also there's the fact that I have a 1GB fiber connection and an office to take advantage of it.
But what I really like is the fact that my customers - with one exception - aren't even dreaming of asking me to come in to their office to work. All (but one) of my customers are contacting me by phone or mail to ask if I can log in and do something for them. Instead of a 45-minute commute on crowded highways, followed by a good 10 to 15 minutes hunting for a parking space, I'm logged in and ready to work inside of ten minutes.
If this remote working situation endures, I will be quite satisfied.
Been working from home since lock down start and loving it. We already had two team members out of office (one emigrated to Canada, the emigrated to Wales). As far as I know our team is still fully productive. Maybe even more productive (I know I am). I don't think we'll be asked to come back in I will refuse anyway. It makes no sense driving 20 minutes to an office and back each day.
I doubt they'll kick up a fuss but tough luck if they do. I'm more than close enough to retirement to flat out refuse.
Loss of human contact
With people working from home, they have far less human contact. This may not seem a bad thing in the short term - however many people marry others that they meet at work or pubs near to work. For many single people this is going to result in a far smaller pool of people at potential mates.
Another effect of the loss of human contact is feelings of isolation leading to depression. There is also the inability to escape annoying children/spouse/pets etc. Penny pinching bookkeepers may not count these costs but they will be felt by their workers and over time will result in a loss of productivity and higher staff turnover. People also tend to feel very little loyalty to bosses (and co-workers) that they never see or talk to.
Many years ago (I think it was in the 1960's) IBM did a study on the most productive office size. They found that 4 man offices were the most productive - large offices tended to have too many disruptions and single offices made it difficult to maintain focus on work. Working from home combines both of these problems - disruptions from others in the house and difficulty in maintaining focus.
Many companies will end up finding that working from home will cost them far more than their savings in office costs.
Re: Loss of human contact
I get what you are saying, But... I have worked from home for 10+years, not meeting my team face to face, but now we have twice weekly video team meetings, so suddenly i am in the loop a lot more. Technology has changed working methods have changed, if it is done right it can work, it is (to use a over used phrase) "the new normal"
Re: Loss of human contact
It's these issues that are slowly beginning to bite.
Aside from the anti-social few who shun all human contact, those few who are content to just sit at home with their loved one(s), the vast majority of humans need human contact and interactivity.
We have very much evolved to be social animals. At one point in time I thought that I could change career to be a hermit, since covid-19 I have proved that this is very much not the right career choice for me.
While productivity is up in some ways, in many others it is very much down - the longer term things such as cross team communication, informal communication, relationship building... all slowly dropping away. OK for a short time, but the impact slowly builds. Even meetings where relationships are built, side ideas are discussed, just don't happen - a video call is usually little more than a glorified presentation with none of the interaction between attendees either on side, during breaks, or anything else happening at all.
The rest of the world has joined me
I work part time. Before lock down I worked 1 day on site, 2 from home. Now I am 3 days from home. I work for a hospital
Now the rest of the team I work in are also working at home we have team meetings on Video that allow me to attend (they happen on my normal off site days)
Working across Hospitals is easier as Video calls stop us having to travel 15 miles between sites. In my team there is no real desire to go back to the office (apart from maybe the air-con in hot weather), The clinical team I support don't want me in the building (at risk patients) again everything now happens my phone,email of video.
Because I have worked from home for 10 years or more, I have on office room, so i can end the day and shut the door.
I think my working from home experience has improved since everyone joined me in it.
Major benefits
There are many other benefits
1. Significant reduction in the need to travel by car and train, so less pollution; quieter roads; quieter trains and therefore less packed trains; quicker travel for those that need to be in an physical location and a far more pleasant experience for everyone.
2. Improved quality of life for everyone - as the daily trudge to and from a building has been removed and we can spend more time with our families
3. DR improvements for many companies given that people are already dispersed
4. Improved protection against future pandemics. Although I wonder what the negative impact on health might be as general if people are not interacting as much, could the common cold get worse over time ??
I hope that more employers embrace the once-in-a lifetime re-assessment of how we all live our daily lives.
NHS
My other half works in a clerical role for the NHS. Most of her team are now back in the office, just those few who are shielding remain at home.
During the lockdown, everyone was working remotely at one stage, then they found they needed 1 person in the office, so that person worked alone in the office.
But the manager can't cope with not seeing the staff, so has insisted on getting everyone back. Thankfully the office is not crowded, but it seems daft to have everyone commuting when they've proven that working from home is at least equally efficient. (Difficult to quantify as the hospital has been quieter due to cancelling as many procedures as they could, so case load went down)
Me, I'm working from home about 80% of the time at the moment - just some hardware jobs need to be hands-on.
Re: NHS
"But the manager can't cope with not seeing the staff, so has insisted on getting everyone back"
Given that I thought initial research indicated that wave of Covid that spread through hospitals was not due to "frontline staff" but by porters and admin staff who moved much more around the hospitals and were the main vectors to spread infections then this sort of manager is almost beyond understanding.(N.b. only people I know directly who had Covid, one was a family where the son was a hospital porter and the other was a non-Covid patient already in hospital recovering from a massive heart attack when Covid arrived)
Can't I just stay...
on furlough? Kind of like being paid to do sod all?
The rest if you that can work, please carry on. I'm off for a stroll later.
On a more serious note, I work on high end car engines and even the rich have stopped buying their super and hyper cars. Our clients are not expecting an upturn until next year at the earliest. 20% of our company has already taken voluntary redundancy. If it wasn't for our motorsport division, we may of folded by now, which would have a knock on effect in thousands of other jobs.
UK engineering is utterly knackered at the moment, come October, expect redundancies to ramp up across the UK.
Re: Can't I just stay...
If that business is the one that buys the kit of whomever is sponsoring the side of the car that season, then there were other issues long before covid came along ;-)
Anon... as I got out too...
Seriously?
"...with North America (NA) leading the charge, which may be linked to the US government's handling of the pandemic."
Wow. The hate is strong with this one.
Not here
So working for a large Defence Contractor we've been told everyone in to work as 'The Director wants to see people working' (despite hitting all delivery milestones over lockdown). Its like working for Brunel.
I'm in an open-plan office with 50 people. I estimate that my Covid risk has gone up between 1 to 2 orders of magnitude.
Those of you who who don't have to put up with this, congratulations.