WFH: The New Normal for financial services: Survey reveals almost two thirds of FS workers believe their employer should do more to help them work from home during the coronavirus crisis

• The first large-scale survey of British working habits since the coronavirus lockdown began finds more than four in five (85%) financial services workers now based at home believe the lockdown has proven they can work effectively from home.
• However, almost two thirds (63%) believe their company should be doing more to help them work productively from home.
• Almost a quarter are using a personal laptop (23%) for homeworking and more than two fifths (43%) are storing work files on their personal device raising concerns about the security of business information.
• FS businesses now facing a trilemma of homeworking problems including a global shortage of laptops, poor home broadband connection and cyber security.

Research into the working habits of Britain’s financial services sector has found that 85% of FS workers say the lockdown has proven that they can work effectively from home.

However, almost two thirds of FS workers (63%) believe their company should be doing more to help them work productively from home.

The study, published by Atlas Cloud, looked into the working habits of more than 3,000 office workers and 440 workers in Britain’s financial services sector, found that a higher proportion of people employed in FS need more help from their employer to work productively from home (57% v 63%).

Only a third (37%) of financial services staff said their employer has helped them to make adequate provisions to work from home long-term.

While almost a quarter (23%) of FS workers said they need their company to act urgently to enable them to work productively from home during the lockdown.

A further two fifths (40%) of workers said they need their company to invest in longer-term solutions with the UK Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, stating that social distancing measures will need to stay in place until at least the end of the year to prevent fresh outbreaks of coronavirus.

The British Health Minister, Nadine Dorries, said: “There is only one way we can ‘exit’ full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine.”

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic less than two-thirds of FS workers (63%) said they always had the ability to work from home when they needed to.

The research has been collected by Atlas Cloud, an award-winning IT provider which delivers IT services on behalf of Experian, Lycetts, Northstar Ventures and Shire Leasing Plc.

Financial services worker on average are encountering 1.5 technological problems each while working from home.

The areas where financial services workers said they needed improvement in their home-working setup included:

• Almost half (47%) who said their work was hampered by the poor performance of their home internet connection
• Almost a quarter of workers (22%) complained of having to log in to too many separate software packages and apps while working from home
• One in five workers (20%) said they could not access the computer files they need while working from home
• Almost a sixth of workers (17%) said the quality of the laptop, desktop or tablet they were using to work on from home was negatively affecting their work productivity

A study or home office is the most common place for financial services staff to work from home accounting for more than quarter (28%) of responses.

More than a fifth (22%) said they are working from the living room, while 20% are working in their bedroom, and 18% in the dining room.

More than half of financial services workers are working on a laptop or desktop supplied by their employer prior to the coronavirus pandemic (54%).

However, almost a quarter (23%) of workers are now working at home on personal laptops and desktops, while a further 23% are working on company laptops bought since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which has fuelled shortages of laptops in the UK, Europe and the US.

While the survey showed that 13% of office workers have flagged concerns about their access to computer files while working from home, more than two fifths (43%) of those now working on personal devices are storing business information on those personal devices.

By storing business information on personal devices homeworkers are taking information away from the business they work for and potentially opening companies up to security breaches of information held on poorly protected personal devices, which may not be encrypted or even be behind a firewall.

Almost one in twelve of those surveyed (7%) said they have no password protection on the computer they are now using while working from home.

Pete Watson, CEO of Atlas Cloud, said: “We are living through the largest overnight change in British working habits since the outbreak of the Second World War.

“Our research shows that the majority of FS workers believe they need more help from their employers to cope with the technological challenges of working from home. However, the research also shows that FS workers may not be working from home as safely from a business and cyber security aspect as they could be.

“This should not at all be a blame game. The financial services sector has faced a national emergency of the kind we have never seen before and the aim for all of us is to help FS businesses to perform as well as they can do during this time.

“We anticipate that among the largest changes we’ll see to our working lives as a result of the coronavirus pandemic is a much larger proportion of Britain’s FS sector working from home more often and a change in how the FS sector handles business information.

“Many British businesses are run using a device-led IT model, where work and sensitive data is often held on devices, like laptops, tablets and smartphones themselves.

“While FS workers have highlighted their difficulties in working from home, FS businesses are also telling us they face a trilemma of significant homeworking problems: including a shortage of laptops, poor home broadband speeds fuelled by entire households connecting their devices at home and cyber criminals using the coronavirus to target businesses with sophisticated phishing and malware attacks.

“To solve the trilemma FS businesses should move away from device-led IT and towards server-led IT such as virtual or hosted desktops, where information is stored on on-premise servers or in the cloud.

“Server-led IT is important for ensuring business security during the switch to home-working as it means staff can work safely on any device and because it takes the control of business information out of the hands of individual employees working on individual devices, where the information is more vulnerable. Server-led IT gives control back to the businesses which retain ownership of all their business information in the cloud.

“For the first month of the lockdown we’ve been telling the FS sector to concentrate on investing in short-term solutions to solve the trilemma of problems facing office-based staff, many of whom have been turned into homeworkers overnight.

“Our survey shows there is still a clear need to implement short-term solutions to enable almost a quarter of FS workers to work more productively from home.

“However, as Britain looks to ease the lockdown now is the time for the FS sector to take stock and then start planning to invest in longer-term remote and home-working solutions.

“To adapt a well-known phrase – Britain needs to get home-working done.”