Almost 80% of office workers believe they can work effectively from home after having to rapidly adapt to meet the demands of the coronavirus lockdown, a new survey suggests.
The research, which has looked into the working habits of more than 3,000 office workers during the coronavirus outbreak, found that 79% of those surveyed felt they could work effectively from their houses, though more than half (57%) felt their employers should be doing more to help them work productively from home.
Just two in five office workers said their employer has helped them to make adequate provisions to work from home long-term, while 38% of workers said they need their company to invest in longer-term solutions so that they can continue to work from home if the lockdown is extended.
The research by Newcastle IT provider Atlas Cloud comes as millions of people who had been working in offices are now operating from their own homes.
It found that a third of workers (34%) said their work was being hampered by the poor performance of their home internet connection, and 20% complained that the quality of the laptop, desktop or tablet they were using to work on from home was negatively affecting their productivity.
Pete Watson, CEO of Atlas Cloud, said: “We are living through the largest overnight change in British working habits since the outbreak of the Second World War.
“Marking a month since the lockdown was announced our research shows that the majority of office workers believe they need more help from their employers to cope with the technological challenges of working from home. However, the research also shows that office workers may not be working from home as safely from a business and cyber security prospect as they could be.
“This should not at all be a blame game. Businesses and office workers face a national emergency of the kind we have never seen before and the aim for all of us is to help British businesses perform as well as they can do during this time.
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“We anticipate that among the largest changes we’ll see to our working lives as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is a much larger proportion of Britain’s workforce working from home more often and a change in how British businesses manage their IT and handle business information.”
The survey found that the living room is the most common place for people to work from home, followed by a home office, though a handful were working in more unusual locations such as their child’s bedroom or shed.
A significant number of people responding to the survey said they were having to store business information on personal devices, potentially leaving firms open to security breaches.
The survey has come as broadband provider Openreach said it had seen a 74% increase in internet usage from last month, thought to be driven by the rise in home working but also people streaming movies or computer games to cope with the coronavirus lockdown.