Vodafone said a global survey revealed that the rapid adoption of mobile broadband services, fixed-line broadband and cloud services is playing an integral role in the implementation of flexible working at companies worldwide.
The UK-based operator said the findings of the survey, which was conducted by Morar between September and October 2015, show that 75 per cent of companies worldwide have now introduced flexible working policies to enable employees to vary their hours and use the latest technologies to work from home or on the move.
Some 61 per cent of respondents said they now use their home broadband service to access work applications and 24 per cent use a mobile data connection via their smartphone, tablet or laptop with a broadband dongle.
The survey is based on responses from 8,000 employers and employees at small and medium-sized businesses, public sector organisations and multinational corporations (MNCs) in 10 countries.
However, a sizeable number of organisations have still not yet implemented a flexible working policy, for varying reasons. Among the 20 per cent of respondents that said this was the case, 33 per cent said they believed it would not suit the culture of their organisation, while 30 per cent raised concerns over friction between employees that work flexibly and those that do not.
At the same time, 55 per cent of employers without flexible working policies in place agreed that employee morale would improve if these were to be introduced, while 44 per cent said they believed productivity would improve as a result and 30 per cent believed profits would increase.
The survey also revealed differences in attitude based on location as well as age. For example, 71 per cent of Spanish employees surveyed use their own smartphone to work flexibly outside the workplace compared with 38 per cent in the UK and 27 per cent in Germany.
As would perhaps be expected, younger workers are more likely to support flexible working than their older counterparts.
For more:
- see the Vodafone report
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