80% of employees satisfied with COVID-19 crisis response in their companies

• Survey of 1,000 employees in Austria
• What people want from a "workplace of the future" after corona

Vienna, September 4, 2020 - Four out of five employees in Austria give their own company a good report card for its response to the coronavirus crisis. 56 percent report newly created home office options. These are the findings of the study "Workplace of the future in the digital world" by the digital company Kapsch Group. A representative survey of 1,000 employees in Austria was conducted by a market research institute.

"In our company, the switch to working from home after the lockdown worked very well," says Daniel Rutter, Executive Vice President Human Resources Kapsch Group. "As a digital group, we have been relying on collaboration solutions in our portfolio for some time. That's why our employees were already well equipped technologically before COVID-19. Flexible working hours have also been common practice at our company for some time - an important reason why our productivity has not suffered during the crisis."

Workplace of the future: younger people think differently.

As the survey shows, there are some differences in the wishes for the workplace of the future in the various age groups. While younger employees (20-40-year-olds) prefer to work with a small number of colleagues in the same room (shared office), older employees (41-60-year-olds) prefer an individual office. Open-plan offices are not popular in either age group. For around a quarter of younger employees, the use of modern collaboration tools such as MS Teams is very important, while this is only the case for 15% of older employees. Finally, both groups show a similarly positive attitude when it comes to the use of mobile devices or being able to work from any location.

Innovation requires personal interaction.

Location-independent working had already become increasingly important at K-Businesscom before the pandemic, partly due to international collaboration on projects. "A digitally networked workplace is the right way to go, especially with regard to the wishes of the younger generation," says Rutter. "However, successful teamwork requires a well-balanced concept. As our daily experience shows, innovations often arise from chance conversations with colleagues from other areas of the company. These informal conversations, for example in the coffee kitchen, and other analog rituals must also be preserved in a digital working world."

Employees in Austria give companies good marks for coronavirus crisis response.

About the survey.

For the survey "Workplace of the future in the digital world", a market research institute commissioned by the digital company Kapsch Group surveyed a representative sample of 1,000 employees in Austria. The results of the field study are analyzed separately by gender (50% women, 50% men) and age group (20-40-year-olds and 41-60-year-olds). The survey was also conducted in Germany (N=1,000) and in the USA (N=1,000).

The Kapsch Group is a globally active technology group based in Vienna. The company's areas of expertise - digitalization and mobility - are addressed by two business units which, as end-to-end providers, offer solutions along the entire value chain. K-Businesscom is the ideal partner for digital transformation. As an expert in traffic management, K-Businesscom TrafficCom offers intelligent solutions for toll collection, smart urban mobility, road safety and connected vehicles.

K-Businesscom pursues the goal of global quality and innovation leadership in all areas and invests around ten percent of its total revenue in research and development every year. The Group's own R&D centers work consistently to bring new technologies to market maturity. Long-standing collaborations with scientific institutions and strategic acquisitions provide additional expertise.