The dawn of the virtual workforce

The dawn of the virtual workforce

Up to 72% of the South African corporate workforce rarely sees the office – do you?

Got as far as "this trend was initiated by the emergence of Apple" then I couldn't take any more.

jes said:

The dawn of the virtual workforce

Up to 72% of the South African corporate workforce rarely sees the office – do you?

Click to expand...

If this is true why are our roads still so congested? 72% is not a number I'm inclined to believe especially seeing as I deal with corporates all the time and many of them still have archaic HR practices that insist on people being in the office.

OMB said:

If this is true why are our roads still so congested? 72% is not a number I'm inclined to believe especially seeing as I deal with corporates all the time and many of them still have archaic HR practices that insist on people being in the office.

Click to expand...

Agreed. Seems like quite a thumb-suck figure.

OMB said:

If this is true why are our roads still so congested? 72% is not a number I'm inclined to believe especially seeing as I deal with corporates all the time and many of them still have archaic HR practices that insist on people being in the office.

Click to expand...

I could not have said it better!

Palm's PDAs got there long before the iPhone was even a breath from a product engineer's lips at Apple.

Roaming for cellphones, WiFi at hotels, cafes, offices. The most the iPhone could have done was make things easier and improve the rate of adoption for the concept of working away from the office - it most certainly didn't enable or pioneer the act.

*edit* Thinking about this again, I remember back when I saw the first Palm Smartphone thinking how awesome an idea it was, and that someday, everyone would be using a smartphone, because it was only a sensible thing to do. My friends said I was being stupid/crazy because nobody would want to use something that looks so bulky/stupid or annoying to use, and 'grown ups' kept telling me that they were pointless devices and would never see adoption.

I'll bet there'll even be some people out there reading posts like this on their smartphones... =_=

72% of the South African workforce is not working at home...

The vitual workforce was also not created thanks to Apple or any of their largely insignificant gadgets in this regard. Instead, support for mobile working has come from the advent of unified communications and presence. E.g. Softphone applications that run on your computer at home, that log you into your extension at work, so people can call you and have absolutely no idea that you aren't in the office. This sort of functionality was available on Symbian phones before Facebook was released, for some context. Presence related services, like your MSN messenger for example, or gtalk, further fascilitate virtual working and are used extensively in large, modern, corporates around the world that need a simplistic way of instantly communicating with people across timezones and borders.

A large percentage of the people reading that article don't know what's going on.

The article doesn't imply that that 72% of people are working exclusively from home, it implies that those people are also able to work from home as opposed to only being able to work in their offices.

It also specifically references the corporate sector, which is specific to those that would essentially sit in offices or cubicles, not those that would need to go out and work a production line or on a farm.

nanonyous said:

A large percentage of the people reading that article don't know what's going on.

Click to expand...

I think you might be misunderstanding what people are saying

The article doesn't imply that that 72% of people are working exclusively from home, it implies that those people are also able to work from home as opposed to only being able to work in their offices.

Click to expand...

I don't see where it implies that?

Up to 72% of the South African corporate workforce rarely sees the office

Click to expand...

so this means what exactly?

It means their eyes are so fixated on their office computers' monitors they hardly ever see their office's interior, of course!

Alternatively it may be a figure grabbed from the air, but there are no doubt many office-workers that are able to, these days, spend the majority of their time away from the office, even if only slightly over a 50/50 weighting.

I call horse****. I mean really, we live in a 3rd world country, with worse internet that quite a few african countries. in the UK and US I doubt highly you find even 50% of the workforce working from home. what with the people that own businesses these days.... they want to sit there and count their golds, while watching you slave away. not to say people dont work away from the office. this article might have been a bit more believable if it had said some employees spent up to 72% of a working day away from the office

A response...

Hi

I would like to clarify some points here...

1. The actual statistics that we (Citrix) released at our event last week stated that: 72% of South African knowledge workers are now regularly working outside of the office, whilst 75% of knowledge workers are using their own personal computing device at work - this does not take the standard task-based user into account.

2. These stats were gathered through our “Future of the Workplace” survey - we surveyed more than 100 CIOs and information workers in May and June 2011.

3. The biggest driving forces for workforce mobility we are seeing at the moment is a) consumerisation and b) rising travel costs

4. Internet speed and bandwidth is not an issue as we are in the business of virtualising applications and desktops, which reside with the data and backend servers in the datacentre - this results in only screen updates, mouse and keystrokes being sent across the wire. A user accessing a virtual desktop and all their LOB apps (including email) consumes 300 - 400 MB of data in a month

5. On average, 71% of the respondents also affirm that the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime actually makes them more productive than if they were only able to work in the office, with 54% of respondents claiming to work outside of the office for one to two full days a week.

6. Overall, 92% of respondents said that working remotely is now completely acceptable at their organisation, implying a considerable shift in knowledge worker and organisational attitudes in South Africa.


If you would like any more information please feel free to give me a call! Citrix Systems - (011)875-6400

Regards,

Simon

thanks for clarifying Simon, now it makes sense, big difference between corporate workforce and knowledge workers.