Virtually all Canadians wants to work from home: Survey
"Hey, technology. I wanna work from home. Or Starbucks. Make it happen, yo."
This is the general consensus of Canadians, according to an Ipsos-Reid survey commissioned by Microsoft Canada. As employees demand more and more flexibility and freedom from their job, working from home is now on the wish list of more than 85 percent of Canadians - and they're relying on technology to make this dream a reality.
The survey reveals that an astonishing three quarters of Canadians believe that businesses limit their access to the talent pool by not offering flexible workforce options. And a remarkably high nine in 10 Canadians say that they would rather not relocate for a job.
Going hand-in-hand with this shift are findings that suggest nearly 90 percent of Canadians demand technology that will help them perform their job from any location. In addition, 84 per cent of Canadians polled currently see location as a barrier from securing the best job, with 88 percent believing that technology should help people avoid the need to relocate for work.
"Canadian workers have historically been bound by the location of their employer. Today though, workers have become upwardly mobile and dispersed across a massive geographical area as the scope of business expands across borders," said Dr. Kevin Stolarick, research director at Martin Prosperity Institute, a part of the Rotman School of Management. "Companies looking to compete in our global economy need to provide employees with the tools to embrace the globalization of business and communicate and collaborate in real time regardless of location."
Enabling Canadian businesses to communicate and collaborate in real time, regardless of geographic boundaries, is crucial for the future. Microsoft Canada belives it is at the forefront of this innovation with its new Lync service.
"Over the past five years, Microsoft has been on a journey to transform communications through the power of software," said Vineet Parmar, senior product manager of Unified Communications at Microsoft Canada. "With the launch of Lync, Microsoft is enabling Canadian businesses to communicate and collaborate more effectively with employees, customers and partners through a single integrated client across the PC, phone and browser. At the same time, Lync offers IT the ability to help reduce costs by replacing PBX boxes with Lync while providing the choice to deploy on premise, in the Cloud, or a hybrid of both."
