One-third of workers in South Africa now work from outside one of their company’s main offices for half the week or more.
This is among the results from a Regus survey on remote working, which found that 62% of people work remotely for at least some of the time.
Asked where they carried out their remote working, only 25% of the respondents said they mostly work from home.
The survey canvassed more than 370 business people in South Africa, aiming to provide a snap-shot of the world of work today. It found that, while remote working is clearly the norm, it certainly is not synonymous with home working: only a minority work exclusively from home (12%).
Rather, workers suggest that they work remotely in order to remain productive while travelling to and from meetings within the same city or in other cities (59%).
Other highlights from the study include:
* Only 12% of remote workers are fully-fledged home workers spending the full week working from their home office;
* Among the most popular locations for remote work, a quarter (25%) select business centres;
* 10% say that they usually work abroad when working remotely; and
* 22% of business people would settle for noisy cafes while working on-the-go.
Joanne Bushell, Regus country manager for Southern Africa, comments: “These results show that today’s workforce is truly mobile. Only a very small proportion of workers are true home-workers spending all their time out of the main office in a home-office.
“Workers report that they are not looking to replace one fixed office space with another such as the home, but are declaring that they need places to stop off and regain productivity while travelling to and from business meetings in their own, or in other cities.
“Business people clearly show that they need drop-in locations where they can productively work from a few hours to a full day,” Bushell adds. “Business centres prove a popular choice as they can be found scattered across cities and provide a professional and collected environment that favours concentration, very much the opposite of noisy cafes where it is hard to find focus and privacy.”
