The days of being bound to the office are done. According to a Gallup survey cited by The New York Times, 43% of Americans reported spending at least some time working remotely in 2016. By 2022, about that same percentage of the total global workforce will be mobile — that’s 1.87 billion people.
Whether your team is partially or completely remote, here are some stats that will help you keep up with the changing ways we work.
1. 78% of employees believe "BYOD" policies boost their work-life balance.
BYOD stands for “bring your own device” — meaning employees will do their work on personal computers, tablets and smartphones. You might guess that your team would prefer to be provided with the tools they need, but the research suggests otherwise. They’d rather just stick to what they already know.
And it’s not just about work-life balance: The average employee saves 81 minutes per week in productivity by using a personal device at work.
Of course, there are still a few concerns to keep in mind…
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2. 60% of Millennials aren't concerned about corporate security when they use personal apps.
This stat doesn’t paint a very pretty picture. As more and more Millennials use their own devices for work purposes, it will be crucial to educate them on security issues. What data and information absolutely must be protected? How do they go about protecting it?
If you arm your remote team with knowledge, they’ll be much less likely to unintentionally trigger a major security breach.
3. Slack has more than six million daily users.
We share this one not to give kudos to the popular collaboration tool (although, hey, good for them!), but to illustrate a trend: People seem to really like office-based chat tools. It’s easy to see why, too: they make it easy to communicate in a casual and efficient way with people all across the world.
Even the big names have hopped on the Slack bandwagon lately: The company serves 43% of America’s largest 100 companies by revenue.
4. Zoom has 700,000 business customers — including half the companies in the Fortune 50.
Apparently people also love video conferencing. We certainly do at Torrent. We use Zoom for every meeting that includes somebody in a different office. It’s incredibly easy to use — we’ve integrated it with Google Calendar — and allows us to connect in more meaningful ways with our colleagues who are hundreds of miles away.
If you’ve got remote employees and you’re not leveraging the power of video conferencing, you’re making a mistake.
Speaking of video conferencing…
5. 66% of workers say their favorite colleague is located in a different office — and it's because of video conferencing.
This stat surprised us the most. Why would an employee have better relationships with the people they don’t actually see and interact with on a day-to-day basis? According to Fast Company, it’s at least partly due to the personal connections forged by video conferencing.
When communicating via video with a remote colleague, you get a peek inside their life. You see their home, their personal taste, their mementos. All of these serve as meaningful conversation starters that don’t exist in an office.
What do you think — do any of these stats surprise you?
