Study: Half of U.S. Information Workers Split Time Between Office, Home and Remote Locations

by officePROhub.com on 10/10/2011 - 05:10 pm

Tags: Cloud Computing, Phones, Virtual Office

Half of U.S. information workers officially divide their workplace time between the traditional office, the home office, and other remote locations. So says a new report from market research firm Forrester Research. What does this mean for your business center?

Let’s first take a look at the findings, then we’ll apply it to the office business center industry at large. According to Forrester’s second quarter 2011 U.S. Workforce Technology And Engagement Online Survey, which questioned nearly 5,000 workers, shines a bight light on today’s increasingly mobile and distributed workforce.

For example, the report reveals that information workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. Fifty-three percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number dips to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

“Looking out five years, Forrester sees three technology ‘trains’ impacting the future of workforce productivity, innovation, and advocacy,” says Matt Brown, vice president and practice leader at Forrester Research. “All three of these trains have left the station: enterprise mobility, enterprise social, and cloud services for business.”

Here are some additional noteworthy findings from the survey:

BlackBerry still has the largest installed base of smartphones for work—but Android and Apple devices combined lead the workplace. While 42 percent of workers use RIM BlackBerry, IT departments are supporting more devices, and Apple and Android are starting to cut into RIM’s enterprise dominance: 26 percent of workers now use Android smartphones, and 22 percent use iPhones.

“We expect a tsunami of mobile user demand for access to portals, productivity tools, and back-end transactional and reporting systems as these devices make it into the hands of the broader workforce,” Brown sys.

Gen Y (age 18-31) is almost twice as likely as Baby Boomers (age 56-66) to use social tools—but adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work, according to forester.

Finally, the use of tablets in the enterprise is exploding. Eleven percent of information workers are using tablets to do their jobs. “Despite a tablet market that’s barely a year old, this is astounding growth,” Brown says.

So what does this mean for your business center? You need to cater more to the mobile worker. With the proliferation of sophisticated mobile devices—and the proliferation of software to help you do more with those devices—traditional office space is not as necessary as it once was. Mobile workers need a landing spot with Wi-Fi and copy center functions. Business centers that can provide this safe haven for mobile workers will find a new revenue stream in the years ahead.