IT &
DIGITAL
The emergence of people working from home has presented challenges and opportunities in equal measure to Cornwall’s tech and digital sector. PFA Research director, Robert Rush, takes a closer look.
the new
normal
The demands upon our home and office broadband connectivity have never been as great as has been the case over the last 18 months. Despite being a very rural community Cornwall is blessed with a high level of broadband coverage - thanks largely to the Superfast Cornwall programmes - which have allowed many office-based businesses to successfully implement business continuity policies and allow staff to switch to flexible arrangements and homebased working. During the first lockdown in April 2020, PFA Research found that the proportion of its What Cornwall Thinks panel members that went out to work dropped from 40% to less than 10% (of which most were key workers) and the proportion working from home increased from 15% to 30%. (Of the balance, about 45% were retired or don’t work and the remainder were laid off or on furlough). After periods of restrictions and a second full national lockdown in 2021, most office workers (at least) are still following Government
ADVERTORIAL
guidance to work at home if possible. According to London and USA market researcher Buzzback, only 60% of us say we are excited for life to go back to the way it was, with 23% of UK respondents no longer wanting to work in an office full-time. Noticeably the pandemic has instigated and accelerated changes to consumer behaviours, with a direct impact on how services are delivered and how we have been ready to adopt them.
The study found that nearly two thirds (63%) of Brits were now working at home more or had started to do so (highest among the five European countries in the study, though lower than most Latin America), with a third (34%) of people expecting to continue working from home more in the future than they had previously done so.
23% of UK respondents no longer wanting to work in an office full-time
PFA Research is the UK representative of the ARTIS Network, an international partnership of similar market research companies. In December 2020, when the UK was fresh from the November four-week ‘lockdown-lite’, we undertook the second wave of a global benchmarking study across ten countries with a sample of 3,000 people, to evaluate the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in terms of consumer perceptions, behaviours and to anticipate future behaviour and trends.
In its ‘Working from home: comparing the data’ blog in May, the ONS concluded that the pandemic has had huge effects on people’s propensity to work from home, but it is too soon to say how permanent or widespread the changes will prove to be. We are likely to see ‘hybrid’ forms of working in which employees attend their central workplace but less often than they did in the past. Some local authorities in the UK are already considering how such movements
POWER TO THE PEOPLE – DATA FOR SERVICES Privacy law, often described by companies as getting in the way of fair business, has benefitted from a huge increase in public awareness and a growing backlash against corporate data use. Intellectual Property and IT solicitor at Stephens Scown LLP, Ben Travers, looks at how consumers could soon be using their data as currency for services.
14 | BUSINESS CORNWALL
