Surveys can be useful, a complete waste of time, or anything in between. Many surveys are conducted to simply validate an answer to a question that is already known. Whether the survey is from the Hawaiian visitor's bureau asking visitors if they enjoy the tropical climate to the Jonas Brothers asking if pre-teen girls have a crush on them, surveys that aim to validate an expected and commonly known answer can indeed be a waste of time.
That being said, a recent survey conducted for Riverbed aimed to validate the well known poor experience of off-site workers that access their corporate files and applications while off-site. While the over-arching answer was as predicted, there were some interesting findings as well.
The survey asked a series of questions of more than 900 U.S. adults aged 18 and up who are employed full time, normally work on-site and have ever accessed business files or software stored on their employer’s server/network/drives from off-site.
The survey found that:
- 47 percent are working off-site more often now than they were 2 years ago
- More than half (54%) concentrate better when working off-site compared to being in the office
- Two-thirds (67%) would like to be able to work off-site more frequently than they currently do
Working “off-site” today means that employees are working remotely from myriad locations, according to the survey:
- 80 percent have accessed business files or software from home
- 37 percent have accessed business files or software from a hotel room
- 27 percent have accessed business files or software from another company office location
- 20 percent have accessed business files or software from a vacation destination
- 19 percent have accessed business files or software from an airport
- 17 percent have accessed business files or software from a business conference
- 13 percent have accessed business files or software from a Wi-Fi enabled public space such as a park
- 11 percent have accessed business files or software from a coffee shop.
The survey also found that, among employees who have ever accessed business files or software from a remote location:
- 29 percent do so at least 5 times per week
- 33 percent say accessing business files or software remotely negatively affects their productivity
- 40 percent say they would work off-site more often if their business files or software would load more quickly
- While waiting for business files or software to load, employees have:
- checked their personal email (44 percent)
- gone to the restroom (43 percent)
- watched TV (41 percent)
- made a phone call (38 percent)
- gotten or made themselves a snack (34 percent)
- day dreamed (26 percent)
- done household chores (19 percent)
- paid bills online (15 percent)
I know what you are thinking. 40% of workers would work off-site more often if they didn't have the performance issues definitely validates the application performance problem that off-site employees face, but the results surely are not nearly as high as the 92% of pre-teen girls that have a crush on the Jonas Brothers.
Luckily for the off-site workers, Riverbed's WAN optimization solutions increase performance close to the level as if they were back on-site. Unfortunately, there is no current solution for the pre-teen crush on the Jonas Brothers.
