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Employee efficiency and quality of work would improve if more companies encouraged mobile working, according to UK research.
The study, conducted by Benchmark Research on behalf of IT solutions company ICL, asked 200 managers about their attitudes towards mobile working, such as working away from home, from different office locations or while travelling. Four out of five felt they could work away from the office at least one day every week, without it harming their performance. Two thirds of respondents were interested in "virtual assistant" support for mobile working.
Sixty eight percent of people interviewed conceded that it is more difficult to work from one office location today than it was five years ago, as a result of changes in the work place. Sixty percent of those surveyed said that they now feel more comfortable with accessing messages and e-mails from home or from locations other than the office.
However the study also revealed that many respondents are not offered technology that can make mobile working possible, with 39 percent of those surveyed saying they struggle to keep track of messages while they are out of the office.
"The office has become something different, it used to be bricks and mortar, whereas nowadays it can be the car," Grahame Sherwin, manager of exchange exploitation at ICL told ElectricNews.Net. "One is more flexible now and you go where the customers are."
Many respondents felt that traditional office support is no longer enough to help meet the demands of the new working practices, where they often traveled to different locations or countries, working irregular hours. Thirty-five percent of respondents said they had missed a business opportunity, or been forced to compromise due to the unavailability of traditional support staff.
A third of those surveyed said that they would now be comfortable with using a voice-activated Personal Virtual Assistant (PVA), while a further third said they would expect to use them in the next five years. Fifty seven percent of managers said that they did not get the most out of their support staff, and would be willing to entrust some administration to virtual assistants.
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