New figures released by a small-to-medium enterprise (SME) IT support company show that there was only a small increase in the number of support requests it received regarding requests to work from home during 2020, in comparison to earlier years.

The HBP Group, which assists almost 1,000 SMEs in the UK, revealed the figures, which indicate that there was an increase of just 3% in the number of SME staff members that asked to work from home in the period from March to December of 2020, in comparison to that period for 2019. Looking at the year as a whole, around one quarter of queries concerned working from home or the use of remote tech like Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365.

This does not mean that the support company feels that staff do not want to work from home more, but just that this desire is not solely driven by the pandemic and that many firms had already begun to move towards it.

Emphasising this, its Commercial Director Phil Denham told London Loves Business that, while March last year was incredibly busy and saw greater numbers of support calls, many firms were prepared to switch to home working. He went on to add that:

“Almost every business we deal with has at least one member of staff who works remotely, so from an IT perspective it was just a case of replicating this for other users.”

Having accountants in Goole or anywhere else that understand smaller businesses can help firms find the funding necessary to make this kind of adjustment.