Australian employees adapting well to COVID-19 lockdown

More than two-thirds (70%) of Australian workers have been able to maintain or even improve their productivity while being forced to work from home during the COVID-19 outbreak, research from Citrix suggests.

A survey of 1000 Australian office workers currently working from home as a result of the lockdown also shows that 78% believe remote working will become more common even after the crisis is resolved.

Only 34% of the respondents to the survey reported that they were working from home at least once per week before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Australian office workers see significant productivity advantages to working from home, including the ability to use time that would have been spent commuting more productively (49%) and being able to concentrate better due to fewer distractions from colleagues (32%).

Work-life balance benefits like being able to spend more time with the family or doing leisure activities (38%) and the reduced stress of not having to commute (36%) were also seen as among the top benefits.

As a result, 43% report working about the same time at home as in the office, and 38% say they work even longer hours.

But the research also found that many companies are not equipped with the technical infrastructure required to support the increased number of employees working from home.

This is leading to more than half (51%) of respondents using apps for businesses purposes — such as WhatsApp — that they would normally only use privately.

This creates a risk for employees, as some of the applications being adopted do not meet the security standards required for the safe handling of business-critical data.

One in four respondents reported that they see technologies such as single sign-on and digital workspace solutions as critical for improving productivity.

In addition, while separate workspaces were rated as the most important factor required to raise productivity (cited by 51% of respondents), only 54% said they are working in a dedicated home office space.

A further 31% are working at the kitchen or dining table, and 11% are working in the bedroom.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Marina Andrejchenko