Companies should re-evaluate their working policies in order to reap the benefits of a mobilised workforce.
So says Brendan McAravey, country manager at Citrix SA, commenting on the Citrix Work Life Balance study of over 450 South African office workers, the results of which were released last week.
The study reveals 54% of workers would embrace mobility - the option of working mostly from home or working more flexible hours - if it was available.
The average worker spends 63 minutes commuting to and from work every day, the study found. Many respondents reported their health and social lives were negatively affected by their long commuting hours.
The study uncovered a strong perception among workers that employers were reluctant to adopt mobile working arrangements because they believed few employees would have the discipline to work unsupervised. "It is time to move on from judging people on how long they spend at their desks to evaluating them on the work they actually deliver," says McAravey.
Workforce mobility can help companies better capitalise on each worker's personal peak productivity times, and ultimately save massively on office space, McAravey says.
Companies need to re-work their legal, HR and data policies to accommodate new working practices, he advises.
Avi Mistry, commercial and government manager at Intel, adds employees who can access their work on personal mobile devices can work more often and more consistently. "The productivity in working from a set of mobile devices versus only a desktop computer is worlds apart," he says.
However, mobile devices, particularly tablets, have been developed and used for consumption of media rather than production, explains Chris Buchanan, Dell director of end-user computing in Africa.
To cope with workforce demands, mobile devices need to be more customisable and have over 10 hours of battery life, says Mistry.
McAravey adds company software and documents must be accessible across multiple devices and operating systems for workers to maximise their productivity.
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