Remote and hybrid workers continue to use personal devices and Shadow IT for work, in opposition to security best practices. This is according to a new report from Gartner, which claims employees are forced to work that way by their employers' “shortcomings”.
Polling 10,080 full-time employees late last year, at organizations with 100 or more employees in the US, Europe and the Asia Pacific, Gartner found that more than half used collaboration applications or web services that they personally obtained. However, most of them are employer-sanctioned, the report added.
Furthermore, the same proportion (55 percent) are using personally owned devices for their work, at least some of the time.
“When organizations were forced to go remote in early 2020, workers started to rely on their own devices or programs they discovered themselves to make up for their employers’ technology shortcomings,” said Whit Andrews, Distinguished Research VP at Gartner. “In 2021, organizations can embrace this trend by expanding the choice of devices and software programs that workers can use with little or no friction.”
The question is, what would remote productivity look like, had employees not take matters into their own hands? Gartner claims there has been a 36 percent increase in productivity since the pandemic began, with another 35 percent reporting no change.
For the majority of the respondents (43 percent), sliding hours were the biggest productivity enabler.
Portable devices also played a major role. During 2020, workers reported an 11 percent increase in the time they spent on mobile and portable devices, while the time spent on desktops fell by eight percent.