News
British businesses champion summer sport
July 2014 by Marc Jacob
The majority of Brits will be watching this summer’s sporting action from the office this year. New research from TalkTalk Business, one of the UK’s fastest-growing B2B telecoms operators, reveals that 60 per cent of employees will watch sport at work during the office hours this summer. While nine out of ten businesses will be permitting staff to do so, only 39 per cent are introducing policies to cope with the added network strain.
Between the World Cup, Wimbledon, the Tour de France and Commonwealth Games, Brits are spoilt for choice in sporting events this summer. With much of the action taking place over the traditional working day, TalkTalk Business surveyed 2,000 full-time workers to see just how many people would be tuning in from the office.
The majority of people are due to catch some of the action at work, meaning the variety and volume of devices connecting to the network will rise rapidly. The faithful office PC remains the preferred choice of device for most respondents (35 per cent), while others clearly favour the dual-screen approach, as employee-owned smartphones (32 per cent) and tablets (27 per cent) both garnered strong support.
Many organisations are putting measures in place to handle the extra pressure. Some 39 per cent of organisations are implementing IT policies, but the remaining 61 per cent of employees say either there is no policy in place or they don’t know what it is. Only 11 per cent say their bosses are restricting viewing to outside of office hours, while just seven per cent will ban it outright.
New government legislation introduced earlier this month gives any employee the right to request flexible working hours. More than one in five (22 per cent) of those surveyed planned to do so, while some said their company is allowing other modern working styles over the summer period. In 29 per cent of organisations, employees will be permitted to work from home, while 20 per cent will provide remote server access to homeworking staff. A further 8 per cent of companies are screening key events in the office.
