Fifteen percent of employees in South Africa confirmed that they have pretended their devices were installing updates so they would not have to attend a call or meeting. This excuse is plausible because software updates can disrupt workdays, with one third (34%) of employees saying they have been late to a call because of updates. These are the findings of a recent study commissioned by Kaspersky to explore workers’ attitudes and habits toward updates.
Frequent meetings are often seen as one of the most unpleasant things in the office routine. The transition to remote work and virtual meetings hasn’t helped the issue, as people experienced fatigue from video calls and felt more tired at the end of the working day. As the recent Kaspersky research shows, some employees found an excuse to skip some of their calls – they pretended that their work devices were unavailable due to updates.
Their colleagues may believe the deception, as they could relate to the experience of needing to update a device themselves. In addition to missed appointments, 39% of employees locally have lost part of their unsaved work or data when their PC or laptop restarted after installing updates.
All in all, some employees see this device downtime as an opportunity to procrastinate, with 19% of respondents admitting that they have installed updates to deliberately waste time at work. Nevertheless, employees mostly don’t like it when their work is interrupted, so 73% wish updates happened outside of work hours to maintain their productivity.