Business Tablet Owners Work Outside the Office

Tablet owners do most of their work outside their primary office, a survey by the Yankee Group suggests. Researcher Denise Lund says 55 percent spend less than 25 percent of their weekly working hours at their primary business office (exclusive of a home office). Tablet users are the classic "remote workers" or "traveling workers."

Tablet owners often work from hotels. Some 10 percent spend between eight percent and 35 percent of their time at a hotel.

More than half work from a customer site or office during the week. About 54 percent spend at least a portion of their weekly working hours at a customer site or office.

In a very condensed time frame (roughly a year), tablets have achieved one-quarter of smartphones’ presence in the enterprise, and one might argue that the computing functionality a tablet represents is sufficient for many remote workers, especially business or technology consultants.

The percentage of employees bringing tablets to work grew 120 percent in 2010, whereas enterprise-provisioned tablets grew only 64 percent.

Employees provided with tablets see an average uplift in productivity of 40 percent across all locations. As a comparison, workers provided with smartphones see just a 16 percent average uplift. It is important to note that we ask respondents to estimate their productivity before we ask which devices they use, so their responses are not skewed by their device usage.