Top Tech Stats: Smartphone sales, office productivity and talent retention
Welcome to your roundup of some of the past week’s most interesting surveys, statistics and reports relevant to those involved in the UK tech industry.
This week, we have statistics relating to productivity, 5G, talent retention and more.
5G smartphone sales
The latest CCS Insight mobile phone forecast estimates that 2 billion mobile phones will be sold in 2018, rising to 2.06 billion in 2021.
Next year the company also expects mobile phone shipments to be rise to $375bn, and again to $396bn by 2021.
The research suggests that this increase can partly be explained by the transition from feature phones to smartphones.
Commenting on the forecast, CCS Insight analyst Laura Simeonova said: “Few people will have failed to see the headlines about the $1,000 iPhone. We believe higher average prices reflect the greater perceived value of smartphones in people’s daily lives. They also reflect the commercial reality of phone-makers trying to maintain profit margins while adding more and expensive technology to their products.”
Inflexible office spaces harm productivity
In other news, a report published by digital consultancy Red Badger has revealed that over nine out of 10 (94%) senior decision makers would expect project efficiency to rise if businesses simply re-arranged their office seating plans to promote cross-departmental collaboration.
The research also found that:
- Almost two-thirds of digital leaders (63%) said their office is divided departmentally
- Nearly seven in 10 (69%) of digital leaders think working with lean, agile methodologies can make it quicker to deliver products and services to the market
- 94% of digital leaders expect their department or company to work in a way that is more collaborative and agile in the next five years
- On average, digital leaders think organisational structure changes will take place in one year and 11 months, compared to the two years and eight months’ average of senior decision makers across all departments
Cain Ullah, founder and CEO of Red Badger, said: “Departmental silos, and arranging offices in this way, feels like a hangover from a time when industrialised workers needed to be closely supervised to ensure that they completed tasks efficiently. In today’s economy, where skilled workers have more autonomy, these seating plans are outdated and as our research shows, are actually slowing organisations down.”
Productivity and workers
New research by mobile app Asana has revealed that unproductive working practices have become the norm for many UK companies, causing employees to feel demotivated.
Almost a third (31%) of the 2,034 UK employees surveyed admit they have either thought about leaving or actually left a job as a result of their company simply being too disorganised.
Outlining potential causes, 42% of employees admitted spending most of their day on futile “work about work” (status meetings, organising work, and tracking down information), as opposed to doing their actual work and moving projects forward.
A further 47% of workers polled were dissatisfied with being regularly taken off a project before the work is finished.