Flexible, mobile and working when and where you want - that's how more and more jobs could look like in the future thanks to modern IT solutions. The fact that the path to becoming a mobile, flexible office is underlined by a study on the workplace in the 21st century, carried out by Crisp Research on behalf of Citrix in May 2015 in the DACH region. 166 IT and business decision-makers working in companies with more than 500 employees were interviewed.
A large proportion of the interviewees assume that sooner or later the classic office will be ousted and the permanent workplace will die out. Only with flexible working models, according to the study, companies can remain attractive for young, highly skilled professionals as an employer.
Flexible working models
Around 46 percent of respondents see this trend as driving the high availability of mobile devices, technologies and cloud services, which employees also know and use from their private environment. No wonder that 42 percent of the respondents said that suppliers of hardware, software and services around the workplace give important food for thought in the design of modern workplace variants. Companies that want to offer flexible, mobile work places great importance on the adaptation of security services, the "cloudification" of the infrastructure (38 percent) and a holistic management of the IT workplace environment (35 percent) , according to the study .Cloud services as a basis
According to the study, 40 percent of the surveyed companies currently rely wholly or partly on cloud-based applications. However, this trend is set to be significantly increased as 78% of the companies interviewed in this study want to further their mobile infrastructures and introduce cloud services such as SaaS or PaaS .
In addition to the appropriate cloud services, a large proportion of those surveyed see good network quality and fast employee connections as one of the most important guarantors of success for mobile workplace models. The availability of mobile devices (57 percent) and the equipment quality of these devices (58 percent) are also a prerequisite for the development of mobile workplace concepts.
Deficits and pent-up demand
Many companies are still lagging far behind the trend. Just under a third of the companies surveyed admitted that they had shortcomings, especially in the field of mobile devices. Likewise, 21 percent of respondents see a need to catch up with the introduction of teamwork and digital collaboration (21 percent). On the other hand, measures for a high network quality (49 percent fulfilled or completely fulfilled) and for the provision of the relevant tools, applications and data (45 percent fulfilled or completely fulfilled) are significantly further advanced.
Plus for employee productivity
More than half of the companies expect a high to very high value contribution by introducing modern IT workplaces. In doing so, the business goals are clearly in the foreground for them: In addition to increasing employee productivity (39 percent), they hope to improve customer proximity (31 percent) as well as cost savings in real estate (29 percent). The promotion of creativity (25 percent) and teamwork (19 percent) also play an important role in every fourth to fifth decision maker interviewed. For the majority of decision-makers in companies surveyed, the IT (62 percent) and HR (52 percent) departments are central implementers of mobile workplace concepts.
Further information on the topic can be found in the study " The Adaptive Workplace - Working in the 21st Century " at Crisp Research on the Internet.
