Remote Productivity In The Workplace

1253 Words6 Pages
Productivity The productivity of a worker is in the best interest of both the employers and the employees themselves. Increasing one’s productivity is a manifold task involving many different factors. Telecommuting can be seen either as helpful or harmful towards getting work done. One of the main arguments against remote working is reduced productivity. The biggest contributor to this is the abundance of various distractions at people’s homes. Ranging from cozy sofas and television to one’s family, there are a lot of factors which can impede an employee’s ability to stay focused on work (Go, 2016). Remote work does not have to be done from home - people can also work, for example, from a park or a coffee shop, given they have access to the…show more content…
The office setting actually is far from ideal: based on a nationwide survey in the US, 86% of the questioned 2060 professionals favour working alone for maximising productivity. 61% find noisy coworkers to be the biggest distraction in the office, and 40% are heavily disturbed by impromptu meetings with their colleagues. These statistics go to show that a loud and people-filled office is a major distraction for many workers, whose productivity would most likely be increased by telecommuting. To put this loss of productivity into numbers, it is estimated that employers in the US lose around $1.2 trillion annually, as workers find it hard to concentrate with all the “water cooler gossip” and other distractions happening (Nevogt,…show more content…
The laptop ought to only be accessible with a strong password only its user knows. The setting which automatically locks an idling computer should also be enabled to prevent unauthorised access. To make things even safer, encrypting employees’ computers should be mandatory (Fried & Hansson, 2013). Many operating systems come with pre-installed encrypting software - for example BitLocker in Windows and FileVault on Mac OS. If not, one can opt for open source software such as DiskCryptor. All these programs are for full disk encryption - this means someone without the password cannot access the files on the computer. Instead, they see ciphertext - seemingly random lines of text which is the result of encrypted plaintext. Upon entering the correct passphrase, the encryption key is unlocked, which consequently decrypts the hard drive. The user must be certain to remember the password (though not written down on a slip of paper), as without it the data is more or less lost. In addition, it is worth noting that disk encryption only works against physical unauthorised access - it does nothing against online attacks e.g. phishing attempts or malware (Lee, 2015). Online security is just as important. As should every computer, so should all the employees’ computers have antivirus software installed and kept up to date, the virus definitions
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