News

Always-on connections stress 40% of mobile workers

Mobile working is costing businesses significantly as employees are forced to take time off sick

5 Sep 2018

Stress and anxiety are costing UK businesses 1.18 billion per year, as 40% of mobile workers say they're suffering from such ailments so take time off sick.

According to research by B2M Solutions, 16% of mobile workers have taken time off work as a result of stress and almost a third say they should be taking time off for a break, but cannot afford to.

"Businesses are placing more responsibility onto their mobile workers but aren't investing in tools to ensure the critical mobile devices they need to perform these new tasks are operating correctly and can be depended on," Gary Lee, B2M chief revenue officer commented. "And it's in their own interest."

B2M has calculated that because businesses haven't managed to offer their employees the resources they need to switch off, it's costing them financially.

"Our estimates on the cost of device failure are conservative, as even our True Cost of Ownership figures do not include further potential impacts such as having to pay overtime to remaining workers to pick up their sick colleagues' excess work, financial penalties for missing customer SLAs, brand reputation damage, insurance claims or in extreme cases the cost of out of court settlements for workers who are unable to return to work," Lee explained.

Another issue is that a quarter of mobile workers haven't told their managers or IT departments that their equipment is failing because they didn't believe the problem would be solved or equipment fixed.

"What we have found in our research is that poorly designed mobile solutions frequently translate to lost productivity and worker frustration as a result of mobile devices and/or applications not performing adequately, adding to the overall solution costs," David Krebs, EVP at VDC Research, added.