Indian workers said they were more productive working remotely as they did not have to deal with pronounced traffic conditions that could span three to four hours each way.
Contrary to counterparts in China or Japan, Indian workers preferred virtual meetings over in-person ones.
Indian workers’ use of technology has accelerated since the onset of the global pandemic, said Rashmi Kotipalli, principal research analyst at Gartner.
“Improved digital dexterity, willingness to use real-time mobile messaging and virtual meeting solutions, along with scheduled flexibility, led to employees experiencing an uptick in their overall productivity while working from home,” Kotipalli said.
More than 40% of surveyed workers in the UK, France and Germany indicated that their productivity stayed the same, while more than 30% of Australian workers said they were more or much more productive working from home.
The survey showed that Indian workers used real-time mobile messaging daily.
Of those surveyed, 83% Indian digital workers confirmed that they used real-time mobile messaging to conduct most work activities and preferred this tool over other virtual communication tools available when working remotely. Indian workers have always desired virtual meetings.
Digital workplace technologies replaced in-person conversations, co-authoring content with co-workers in real-time and offline file transfers in 2020, Kotipalli said.
“These digital workplace technologies have now emerged as the core components of the “new work hub” which represents an evergreen collection of cloud-based, personal and team productivity technologies,” she said.
During the pandemic, Indian workers experienced first-hand the flexibility benefits they can reap out of virtual meetings, and “now this has become their preferred choice,” she added.
Globally, 60% of workers said they used messaging tools daily, including 50% using collaboration and storage/sharing tools daily.
Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2022, the share of knowledge workers working remotely will increase to 47%, up from 27% in 2019. However, simply moving from onsite to remote is not the destination but a starting point for CIOs to embrace radical flexibility and implement newer ways of working – with supporting technology – across the enterprise.
A recent Gartner survey of 2,410 hybrid/remote knowledge workers showed that with a human-centric workplace, worker fatigue is reduced by 44%, intent to stay increased by 45% and employee performance increased by 28%.
