How Australian Employees Feel About COVID-19
As part of our #pandemicEX project, Forrester surveyed over 1,800 working adults across Europe and Asia Pacific, including 274 in Australia, to find out how they feel their firms are responding to the coronavirus.
Key highlights from the survey:
- Australians are bracing for further disruption… Not surprisingly, 72% of Australian respondents are “afraid of the spread” of coronavirus and only 29% are confident that they are “personally safe” from it. A large number of Australians, 80%, believe that coronavirus will disrupt their work life, whether or not they’ve come into direct personal contact with the virus itself.
- …and seeking trusted information from official sources. The overwhelming majority of Australian workers, 92%, trust their employers as a source of information about coronavirus. The same number also trust the information they’re receiving from government agencies.
- Job security is a major concern. Nearly one in three Australian workers say they are concerned that their company “may not make it financially” and may have to close. With the government estimating up to 1.7 million unemployed from the impact of the coronavirus, an even higher number of respondents, 42%, are concerned that their job is not secure and that they “might be let go if things get bad enough.” On the positive side, 66% of Australian workers agree that their firm “has a plan for how [they’ll] manage” the risk associated with coronavirus. And 63% believe that their company will put their “health and wellbeing first” when making decisions about coronavirus.
- Australians working from home need more support. Approximately 30% of respondents admit that they are ‘not as productive working from home.” Why? Because while 73% work for companies that have restricted or cancelled internal meetings and face-to-face interactions, only 54% believe their firms have the technology resources to support working from home. In fact, 46% of respondents “cannot wait to get back to the office when all this is over.” And 30% acknowledge having a “hard time managing my family/childcare responsibilities working from home during the coronavirus situation.”