What's the best way to communicate with remote workers?

The rise of flexible working arrangements is evident, with more than four in every five employees (86%) having used at least one tool that enables remote working in the past month.

In a new Regus survey of 44,000 senior employees across 100 countries, including in Asia, Skype emerged as the most popular instant messaging tool (60%), used at least once a month, especially popular in the United Kingdom (58%) as well as United States (47%).

On the other hand, WhatsApp turned out to be the best way to contact remote workers in Hong Kong (93%) and Singapore (92%), followed closely by Skype in both regions.

In Taiwan and Japan, LINE was the most commonly used tool by the respondents, at 91% and 66% respectively, while Kakaotalk took the lead in South Korea,

Such resources to stay connected proved popular, as just one in every 10 respondents said they had not used an instant messaging tool in the past month.

"From feeling out of touch with colleagues, to being unable to access documents on the company server, technology is bridging the gap," said Michael Ormiston, country manager at Regus Hong Kong.

ALSO READ: When dealing with analytics, "start where the pain is"

Working remotely also fuels a need for cloud applications to enable file sharing, where Dropbox proved to be the most popular tool in the global average (56%), also the most popular in Singapore (77%), Hong Kong (72%) and Japan (47%).

Google Drive (43%) and TeamViewer (25%) are the next most commonly-used online file-sharing services by those working remotely.

In Taiwan, however, Google Drive was the preferred option (76%), while those in Mainland China tend to Microsoft remote desktop (34%).

Ormiston acknowledged that the growth in instant messaging applications and document-sharing services is playing an enormous role in helping more people to work flexibly.

"This means they can be fully operative even when they are not in the office and in fact, they can save time spent travelling into the office or to and from meetings by working closer to home and so boost productivity," he added.

Image: Shutterstock