Just 5% of workers ever truly leave the office Only 5.9 per cent of workers disconnect from the office while on leave, and 40 per cent have tried in-flight Wi-Fi to keep them connected. The figures come from iPass, provider of a single login for companies to provide internet access to their employees. That gives the company a huge quantity of analytical data, which it has …
My firm uses the iPass service and I find it a very useful way of getting some free internet access when I'm on holiday (or even just biffing about at the weekends).
If you connect via one of their "partners" you don't even need their special client software, just a web browser - which makes it ideal on all sorts of devices including mobiles and hand-held games consoles.
I'm not working though...
Leaving aside the failure to round 5.9% to the nearest integer[1] this is all a bit silly.
40% of "workers" have tried in-flight WiFi? Really? You don't think that might be a little unlikely?
How about 40% of users of a service that's targeted at highly mobile workers who may be very keen on working from anywhere? Which is probably a much smaller proportion of the workforce, don't you think?
[1] Hint: try 6
"The figures show that more than 90 per cent of those who planned to get an iPad-style device intend to use it for work."
How? They (meaning not just the iPhad) have very little purpose in the first place, let alone in a business sense.
Exhibit A: iPhone / Androids are perfectly good phones in their own right but for work, where the ability to tap out a possibly long e-mail on a device is essential, the BlackBerry with its keyboard beats an on-screen keyboard every time.
Exhibit B: Tablet computers don't usually have keyboards.
In summary: you need a keyboard for work and opinion to the contrary is just a way of trying to wangle a new toy.
Just back from Turkey and for the first time in the last 5 years I didn't check my work emails, get a panic call from them saying the Exchange server is down and can I fix it (no I'm on a beach FFS).
I also didn't even feel the need to switch on my laptop and do some coding.
And what a wonderful experience it was! Must do it again.
We have automated scripts that will look at the times you have selected to be on vacation and will disable your accounts during that time. HR also requires you to take a certain amount of time off each year, mostly for your mental health. It is also to find bad employees, since everyone is supposed to know what the others in their departments do and their needs to be clearly-written documentation on how your job works. Prevents 'single-bus' situations and everyone is generally happier and less-stressed. As in people can rest assured that if something as catastrophic as the Exchange server going down, there is someone that knows how to fix it without having to call people that are on vacation.
Coming back from my first vacation since this was implemented, I have to say that I love it. Came back relaxed and happy, something I have never experienced before as the head of the IT department.
A company that provides remote connection tools for company's employes says that most employees of most companies need to use them. Whatever next?
As it is, the figures are extremely dubious, seeing as how a large proportion of employees hardly do any work even when they're in the office - let along giving up their vacation time to do more. Unless that "work" is chatting to their equally indolent friends about what was on telly last night, sending stooopid email jokes and using the company's network for their own private web access.
Of course, the opposite is also possible, these people _do_ actually connect to the office while on holiday, not because they have to but because it beats the hell out of having to spend time with their partners and children.
... but i felt it needed repeating. How do they know these people were on holiday and not on business trips? If they just count someone as loggin on inflight or in a different town as being on holiday thats just plain stupid.
I fly to Toulouse once a month for work and yes, i login to my company portal on the way and once there. Its called a business trip. When im on holiday, noone in the office will hear from me until the day i walk back in the door.
The only people ive ever met who actually check there work stuff whilst on a holiday are top level managers (because they dont trust their plebs not to cock up/organise a coup whilst they're gone) and people who are actually on Jolly's and not on "official" holidays.
Questionable research for sure...
That is to say that:
Of people who are on a system to work away from the office, only 5% of a small group of them surveyed, don't in fact work away from the office.
Have I summarised that too much? Why is this news? Is this just advertising for iPass?
Also when will iPass have to change their name, becuase it sounds like something that Apple sends to journos to let them into iExhibitions or iPressreleases?
"even where there's good 3G coverage Wi-Fi is still the preferred connection option. That's particularly interesting given that 3G should be able to offer a comparable experience"
No, er, surprise, Sherlock. 3G counts towards data allowances on most devices I can think of. Wireless doesn't. And you can factor in cellular data roaming charges for people away from their home networks too.
Although our head office is in Indochina (GMT +7), we have representative offices in Europe as well as Toronto (GMT -5) our intra-office communications are, in the main, text-based, with occasional voice communications when urgent.
Until about a year ago we were just as guilty as most of taking our work home but then there was a minor revolt in our Europe office at which point in time we revamped our communication practices.
All inter personnel communications are routed through our office servers which are programmed to re-direct all out of hours calls to voice intercept (voice mail) where the messages are stored until the next business day. When our staff are not working, through national holiday or annual vacation, no messages are delivered.
We acquired a twin SIM adapters for our GSM devices with one SIM being for office related communications and the other for personal communications.
Although this regime took effect it required some individual discipline which was reinforced by server programming.
Now all personnel from senior partners to the office staff are able to enjoy personal time free of interruptions to pursue personal activities. It is surprising jut how many clients understand our company policy.
North America led this invasion into personal time and it has slowly spread around the world.
Unless people get real breaks from their work, their quality of work will suffer. Travel time, by road, rail or air, is an ideal resting period - not an extension of working hours - particularly since concentration is so difficult.
Try partitioning your life, it will benefit yourself, your family and your employer - which was what our European employees demanded. We managed without instant communications throughout the industrial revolution and most of the demand these days cannot be rated as 'essential'.
Not too many generations ago nobody had artificial lights. Sunshine was not only the best option, it was the only option. What is really been missed, especially in the US, is that global communications demands one sort of time shifting and global manufacturing operations demand another sort. Obviously a help desk or call center (one side of the world) works when you (other side) do. In a factory or remote installation , the situation is a bit different. When the home office says "work two hours longer" they could very easily be saying (in the kindest interpretation) that employees will not see daylight for six months out of the year because work is in artificial light.
Daylight, and sunshine are an important part of Work-Life Balance, especially for families with school age children. This issue is so far below the radar in the US it is nearly below ground level. A US employer "refused" a request for odd hours or overtime because they are asking for the "wrong hours" is stunned and confused - there are no "wrong" hours in the law.
The "workday" depends a lot on where you are, and not only who you are. Perhaps the largest collective yawn of my storied career (of collective yawns) was when I showed this visualization around: http://www.rustprivacy.org/sun/Sunshine.pdf
Note to El Reg: Did you ever stop to consider that suicides in Chinese plants might be related to stress, pay *and* stealing sunshine (in the form of 12 hour days) ? I did. My guess is, problems not over, by a large margin.
@Robert Grant, not where I live. Verizon's got their act together, where I'm at now is pretty slow (like 128kbps), but I usually get at least 1mbps. Wifi should beat this, but I actually used 3G over wifi several times this week, becaue the wifi only got about 16KB/sec (128kbps) while I got like 100KB/sec (800kbps) or more on the 3G.
The sort of company that implements that sort of universal login system is I would imagine the sort of company that has a huge culture of never being out of communication. I've worked for one of those companies in the past, and was hauled over the coals for first of all refusing to have a blackberry, and then secondly for not turning it on/carrying it when they ordered it for me anyway. Under that sort of culture, many people feel like they're being lax for not continually checking their emails in evenings, at weekends, on holidays or even in the middle of the night - I've seen it happen to colleagues, and it's a really really shitty thing to feel pressured into. So it's no surprise that a company who sells that sort of system to those sorts of people will see high incidence of people logging in day and night.
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