WORK FROM HOME: DIGITAL PREPAREDNESS OF EMPLOYEES
Technology has, whether we want it or not, become a part of our everyday life and has, maybe more than we can imagine, “taken over” our lives. A big plus, however, is that digital technology helps us stay connected to each other and to the organizations we work with or for. They open up markets, create jobs and connect us better with our consumers.
Cisco conducted a survey called the Global Digital Readiness Index for 2019. It measures the digital readiness of 141 countries on seven continents. The research reveals the importance of whether a country is digitally prepared and the positive impact that the digital economy can have on an individual economy.
The top ten countries are occupied by Western European countries, while highly digitally prepared countries are Singapore, Luxembourg and the USA. Slovenia is ranked 28th.
As said above, the fact is that modern IT technology is a part of our everyday life. During the Covid-19 situation, however, the use of technology only increased. Due to the epidemiological situation, our daily lives have changed, and they have also affected our work, which has mostly moved to work from home. We have written about the “new” way of working in previous blogs about the benefits of remote work, we also gave tips for better organization of work from home, running virtual meetings and how to build trust, despite the fact that we are not every day with colleagues in the office.
Let’s take a look at another survey by the Slovenian company ECG – Energos consulting group, which conducted a survey on Slovenia’s digital readiness to work from home in the first half of May 2020, when we were still getting used to working remotely.
More than 500 respondents took part in the survey, with the help of which they found the following:
- the willingness of citizens to work from home is quite high,
- they rate the general well-being of the respondents a little higher than when working at work.
They also highlighted the challenges that working from home brings, such as:
- socializing with colleagues,
- education and training opportunities,
- availability of certain data needed for work.
You can help yourself with the challenges of organizing education, training and sufficient socializing, as well as social contact between employees with our blog about socialization in new conditions.
A great indicator of how well we got used to and have organized work from home is the fact that 90 % of respondents in the ECG survey would not want to return to work but would rather continue working from home.
In conclusion, we would like to emphasize that we are happy that Slovenia is so high on the scale of digital readiness, because in our opinion this is the reason for such a good introduction of a new way of working, which we did without major problems. In addition, our high digital readiness is a great starting point and a springboard for the future, as there will be more and more modern IT technologies.
