How quickly are people actually returning to the workplace?

At Amito, we are constantly monitoring and analysing traffic flows on our network to check performance and availability, and to plan for future capacity upgrades. There are some patterns that you’d probably expect – weekends are quieter than weekdays for office/productivity traffic, and Christmas Day is consistently the quietest day of the year. We started to see some major changes to traffic patterns in April, as much of the nation switched from an office environment to working from home.

As you can imagine, a network operator can look at the split of traffic between home broadband and office leased line connections, and home productivity tools like video calling. We set out in April to analyse the anonymised data for a specific metric – the proportion of people working from home or working from the office.

We’re pleased to be able to share our “Amito Office Working Index”, which is graphed below. As you can see, the graph starts in May and is fairly flat throughout the month. This indicates that May was pretty steady, with no material change to the number of people working from home. However, as we enter June (perhaps linked to some schools starting to return) there’s a consistent increase in the index showing more and more people are going to their offices.

We’re going to continue to track this metric for the next couple of months; we expect there could be significant changes at both the beginning of August (when government guidance on working from home changes) and the beginning of September (when schools return, alleviating childcare challenges for many workers.)

The dramatic shift that we’ve seen over the last 6 months to home working and now back illustrates just how important it is to have a responsive and flexible managed hosting provider. We have found ourselves flexing fast to solve our customers challenges- more so than ever before in these last few months. For customers in the video conferencing space, for example, we have provisioned additional capacity rapidly to enable them to meet growing customer demand; and similarly for those customers in the gaming industry we were able to provide new hardware and additional colocation solutions as needed as they experienced a huge surge in activity.

But the really key thing for all our customers in these changing times has been our support team. We recruited throughout lockdown to make sure that we could manage the load efficiently, providing critical remote hands to support our customers.

For all of you interested in the data and following the trend as we see a return to office working, I’ll share the Amito Office Working Index again in September! And if you’re suffering with infrastructure growing pains, let us know how we can help.

Author: Ed Butler, CEO