In the past, working from home was thought of as a special case. That attitude had been changing, slowly. Then COVID-19 hit and companies were forced to reevaluate virtually overnight. The shift may not have been through choice, but now even some leaders with the most entrenched objections to home working have changed their minds. It seems that necessity is also the mother of evolution. The “new normal” remains uncertain, but it’s a safe bet that more flexible working arrangements are going to be part of it.
Let’s start just calling it “work.”
Mobile Security Index
2021 Report
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Out of Office
You don’t need a research report to tell you that there was a massive increase in the number of people working from home in 2020. Remote working has become commonplace and things are unlikely to ever go back to the way they were. Numerous companies have announced long-term—or even permanent—work-from-home policies and plans to reduce their property footprint.
We anticipate never going back to five days a week in the office, that seems very old-fashioned now.
--- Alan Jop,
Unilever CEO6Almost two-thirds (66%) of respondents said that
they expect the term “remote working” will have
disappeared within five years.Netskope has called this phenomenon “inversion.” Its research found that the ratio of remote workers to others went from one in four at the start of 2020 to two out of three by the summer. And that pattern continued throughout the rest of the year.
Our survey respondents reported similar numbers. Nearly four-fifths (79%) of organizations saw remote working increase. Overall, the share of remote workers grew from around a third (32%) of the average workforce before lockdowns began to nearly twice as many (62%) during lockdown.
We also asked respondents what they expected this proportion to be once COVID-19 is just a memory. A large majority (70%) of those that had seen remote working grow following the introduction of restrictions expected it to fall again afterward. However, 78% said that it would still remain higher than before lockdown. Overall, our respondents said that they expected the number of remote workers to settle at around half (49%).
Interestingly, the difference between small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises was quite small, just a few percentage points. The biggest difference was how much more capable larger companies were of adjusting operations to switch employees to working from home. SMBs increased home working by 22 pp, enterprises by 32 pp.
This chart isn’t meant as an homage to Joy Division—or the cover of the 2015 DBIR for you fans of our sister publication. Those of you with a knowledge of statistics will recognize these as confidence plots. The horizontal center of each curve shows the mean—32% in the pre-lockdown results. As our respondents are just a sample of all businesses, the actual average may be different; this is called sampling error. Statistically, we can say that the true number is within the two dotted lines with 95% confidence. In this analysis, the potential error is small, around just ±2 percentage points (pp).
We also asked respondents what they expected this proportion to be once COVID-19 is just a memory. A large majority (70%) of those that had seen remote working grow following the introduction of restrictions expected it to fall again afterward. However, 78% said that it would still remain higher than before lockdown. Overall, our respondents said that they expected the number of remote workers to settle at around half (49%).
Interestingly, the difference between small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises was quite small, just a few percentage points. The biggest difference was how much more capable larger companies were of adjusting operations to switch employees to working from home. SMBs increased home working by 22 pp, enterprises by 32 pp.
89%
Eighty-nine percent of remote workers have encountered connectivity or poor user experience issues during the lockdown.8
The productivity question
Historically, there have been many reasons why companies have been reluctant to let employees work from home. The main reason our respondents cited for not enabling more staff to work from home was the nature of their roles—either there was no demand for the role (for example, the store, restaurant or other site was closed) or the role couldn’t be done remotely (for example, production line jobs and care workers).
Another reason has been that some leaders felt that staff couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be as productive working remotely. But attitudes are changing. Three-fifths (60%) of respondents to our survey said that the productivity of remote workers was at least as high as those onsite. And one in five (20%) said that it was significantly higher––and that was at a time of mass disruption, with many people using makeshift workstations and a large number of parents having to cope with challenges like remote schooling.
Enterprises (61%) were more likely to say that the productivity of remote workers was at least as good, compared to SMBs (54%). There was more variation by region. It’s tempting to try to explain these numbers—and with U.S. and U.K. contributors, we had some interesting conversations—but we don’t have the data to confirm any hypothesis.
These variances remind us about the dangers of averages. Working from home is much easier for some workers than others. For instance, the technology to create virtual call centers is well established, and companies with adaptable infrastructures were able to transition workers quickly. It’s also worth noting that some companies were able to successfully empower staff to work from home, but not in their normal role.
For instance, when its U.S. retail stores were forced to close, Verizon was able to retask staff to provide online support—which was seeing a huge growth in demand.
Not all roles are as easy to shift. Some industries, like manufacturing, tend to have more of these sorts of roles and so faced greater challenges.
The security question
Nearly all (97%) security leaders consider remote workers to be exposed to more risk than office workers.9 And almost half (49%) said that changes during lockdown conditions affected mobile security for the worse.
43%
According to NetMotion, 43% of companies experienced cybersecurity issues with remote workers in 2020.10
Mobile devices were critical to maintaining business continuity during lockdown by enabling employees to stay productive from home. That explains the 26% increase in their use we saw in the first 100 days.
- Aaron Cockerill, Chief Strategy Officer, Lookout
In fact, one in three (33%) respondents said that it wasn’t possible to enable all the employees to work from home that they wanted to due to security or compliance issues.
One of the most obvious reactions to dealing with the security challenges of the increase in home workers was the increase in demand for mobile device management (MDM). Contributors to this report, like IBM, MobileIron and Wandera, all reported seeing an increase in new license sales, and Verizon saw an order-of-magnitude increase in purchases of its MDM solution.
The number of requests for proposal (RFPs) for large enterprise mobile threat defense projects more than doubled from 2019 to 2020.
- Michael Covington,
VP Product Strategy, Wandera 11
6 Reuters, Reuters Next conference, January 2021.
7 Netskope, January 2021. Research was performed on anonymized usage data collected from a subset of Netskope Security Cloud platform customers (primarily North American) that had given permission for this use.
8 NetMotion, SDP report, June 2020. A survey of over 600 network and IT professionals across the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
9 NetMotion, SDP report, June 2020. A survey of over 600 network and IT professionals across the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.
10 NetMotion, Experience Monitoring Report, November 2020. A survey of 500 IT professionals and 500 office workers now working remotely.
11 Michael Covington, statement, January 2021.
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