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15 Surprising Stats on the Shift to Remote Work due to COVID-19

By Riverbed Technology
23-Apr-2020

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, “work from home” has rapidly escalated from one of many remote work options to “the remote work option.” For IT professionals, this means enabling employees with the basics (laptops and connectivity) and optimizing application delivery despite unpredictable network performance due to bandwidth contention and latency. Here are 15 stats to help you as you prepare for the new normal of working from home.

15 surprising stats on the shift to remote work

There has been a massive shift to work from home. 88% of organizations have encouraged or required their employees to work from home and 91% of teams in Asia Pacific have implemented ‘work from home’ arrangements since the outbreak.[i]
Coronavirus has been a catalyst for remote work. 31% of people said that Coronavirus (COVID-19) was the trigger to begin allowing remote work at their company.^[ii]
Organizations are mobilizing, using crisis response teams to coordinate their response. 81% of companies now have a crisis response team in place. [iii]
Business continuity tops C-level concerns. 71% of executives are worried about continuity and remote work productivity during the pandemic.[iv]
Cloud investment will continue. Software is expected to post positive growth of just under 2% overall this year, largely due to cloud/SaaS investments.[v]
SaaS usage soars to meet collaboration needs. Use of video conferencing is exploding as Zoom reached 200 million daily participants (paid and free) up from just 10 million in December.[vi]
Microsoft 365 video usage jumps. People are turning on video in Teams meetings two times more than before and total video calls in Teams grew by over 1,000 percent in the month of March.[vii]
Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the crisis. Over a 24-hour period, Microsoft detected a massive phishing campaign using 2,300 different web pages attached to messages and disguised as COVID-19 financial compensation information that actually led to a fake Office 365 sign-in page.[viii]
Technology and infrastructure are some of the biggest barriers to connectivity and remote workforce productivity. 54% of HR leaders indicated that poor technology and/or infrastructure for remote working is the biggest barrier to effective remote working in their organization.[ix]
Poor SaaS performance hampers remote worker productivity. 42% of enterprises report that at least of their half distributed/int’l workers suffer consistently poor experience with the SaaS apps they use to get their jobs done.[x]
New tools can improve SaaS performance. 81% report that it is important to adopt tools and techniques to address network latency issues that impact Microsoft 365 performance.[xi]
Remote work has a positive impact on workforce retention. To retain staff in recovering from the COVID- 19 pandemic response later in 2020, organizations should expect that 75% of their staff will ask to expand their remote work hours by 35%.[xii]
Remote work boosts productivity. Remote workers are 35% to 40% more productive than people who work in corporate offices.[xiii]
Lower OpEx is an important benefit of work-from-home. 77% of executives say allowing employees to work remotely may lead to lower operating costs.[xiv]
Remote work is here to stay. 74% of companies plan to permanently shift to more remote work post COVID.[xv]

Learn new short- and long-term strategies to enable your remote workforce and improve remote work productivity

The Gartner Report, Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak: Short- and Long-Term Strategies for CIOs can provide you with insightful recommendations on how to respond, recover, and thrive. For more resources on how to optimize performance for your work-from-home employees, check out our solutions page www.riverbed.com/remote-workforce-productivity.

[i] Gartner, Coronavirus in Mind: Make Remote Work Successful!, 5 March 2020

[ii] https://www.owllabs.com/blog/coronavirus-work-from-home-statistics

[iii] Gartner, COVID-19 Bulletin: Executive Pulse, 3 April 2020

[iv] Gartner, COVID-19 Bulletin: Executive Pulse, 3 April 2020

[v] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS46186120

[vi] https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/

[vii] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-meetings/

[viii] https://www.darkreading.com/threat-intelligence/after-adopting-covid-19-lures-sophisticated-groups-target-remote-workers/d/d-id/1337523

[ix] Gartner, Coronavirus in Mind: Make Remote Work Successful, 5 March 2020

[x] ESG, March 2019

[xi] TechTarget, Feb 2020

[xii] Gartner, What CIOs Need to Know About Managing Remote and Virtual Teams through the COVID-19 Crisis