Indian companies to be front-runner in embracing mobile workstyles

India has emerged as a front-runner in adopting mobile work-styles, while a quarter of global companies have already fully adopted mobile workstyles.

By the middle of 2014, 83 per cent of organisations will have embraced mobile work-styles. By 2020 organisations are set to reduce office space by almost 17 per cent, and each person will access corporate IT network from an average of six different computing devices, according to study by IT firm Citrix.

The trend towards fewer office-based employees – who use multiple computing devices to access corporate applications, data and services from a range of locations outside of the traditional office – is part of a global trend called mobile work-styles.

Some of the highest desk-to-worker ratios in 2020 would be in Japan (8.77), South Korea (7.95) and Germany (7.90) and India (7.12). The figure for 2020 is as low as six desks for every 10 workers in Singapore, the Netherlands, the U.S. and the U.K.

''Organisations are encouraging people to operate outside of the traditional workplace on their own personal devices to improve the bottomline – by making the organisation more responsive, improving productivity and reducing the cost of real estate and device management,'' said Mick Hollison, vice president, integrated marketing and strategy Citrix.

According to the report, one-third of people (29 per cent) will no longer work from their traditional office. Instead, employees will base themselves from various semi-permanent locations including the home (64 per cent), field and project sites (60 per cent), and customer or partner premises (50 per cent). People are also expected to access corporate applications, data and services while mobile from locations such as hotels, airports, coffee shops and while in transit.