Employees feel more productive at home, wish to continue remote work: Report

A majority of employees across the globe wish to continue remote work even after it’s deemed safe to return to offices and feel more productive at home, according to the CyberArk State of Remote Work survey.

As per the survey report, despite the challenges of work from home, employees recognise various benefits of remote work including, saving time on commuting (32 per cent), being able to run errands (24 per cent) and catch up on household chores between meetings (23 per cent).

However, remote workers had to overcome several challenges to balance their work and personal lives as well. Seventy-eight per cent of respondents admitted to having technical issues with connecting to corporate systems and resources cited as the most significant challenge while working from home.

Forty-five per cent of remote employees faced challenges such as disruption from family and pets as the, followed by balancing work and personal life (43 per cent) and ‘Zoom fatigue’ (34 per cent).

Even though the majority of employees felt that the benefits outweighed the challenges, the long-term viability of remote work needs to be reconsidered owing to the security challenges that companies face.

Employees will need to balance security, productivity and convenience while working from home.

“Sixty-seven per cent admit to finding workarounds to corporate security policies in order to be more productive including sending work documents to personal email addresses, sharing passwords, and installing rogue applications,” the report said.

“However poor security habits go far beyond sidestepping a policy or two and more education is not changing these behaviours,” it added.

Though 54 per cent of the employees said that they had received remote-work specific security training, 69 per cent of respondents admitted to using corporate devices for personal use.

Fifty-seven per cent of employees said that they allow other members of their household to use their corporate devices for activities such as schoolwork, gaming and shopping. Eighty-two per cent of respondents admitted to reusing passwords.

“The global pandemic has been the largest test yet for the future of distributed work. Working people have proven incredibly resilient as they rise to the challenge and overcome the stress and significant obstacles of blending home and work lives,” said Matt Cohen, Chief Operating Officer, CyberArk.

“As we continue to adapt to this new way of operating, it’s the responsibility of both employees and organizations to take responsibility of corporate security. Organizations should continually reinforce best practices and implement user-friendly tools and policies while employees need to understand and be receptive to those policies,” Cohen added.

The CyberArk State of Remote Work Survey was conducted in October 2020 by an independent research agency. The study included responses from 2,000 remote office workers in the United States, UK, France and Germany.

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