53% Indians dodged office calls feigning devices were updating: Kaspersky

Kaspersky says the excuses are plausible in some cases because software updates can disrupt workdays

Work-from-home and a constant need to be in a virtual meeting is making employees come up with tech excuses for not joining the call. About 53 per cent of employees in India confirmed that they have pretended their devices were installing updates so they would not have to attend a call or meeting. Sixty-three per cent said they did attend calls, albeit a little late, for much the same reason. These are the findings of a recent study commissioned by Kaspersky to explore workers’ attitudes and habits toward updates.

Kaspersky also said that the excuses are plausible in some cases because software updates can disrupt workdays.  

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, 58 per cent of employees 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 49 per cent 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 74 per cent wish updates happened outside of work hours to maintain their productivity.

“Typically, updates are downloaded during working hours in silent mode and do not affect a business. However, to apply them to the system, a restart is required. Of course, some business matters can’t be postponed, so usually a user can restart within a certain timeframe. As we can see, some people either miss such notifications or do not want to do this. Therefore, the required restart may happen at the most inconvenient moment – right before an important call or when they are writing a long email,” – comments Egor Kharchenko, IT Service and Asset Group Manager at Kaspersky.

In April 2021, Kaspersky commissioned Savanta to conduct an online survey of 15,000 respondents to explore people’s device update tendencies. The sample included 1,000 respondents from each of the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain; and 500 from each of the USA, Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Romania, UAE, Turkey, South Africa, China, India, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Russia. All respondents used a PC, smartphone and/or tablet for either their personal or work lives, and 76 per cent of the respondents were currently employed.