Study: Workers happy with IT policies

While a majority of workers across the globe remained dissatisfied with their company's IT policies, Australians by and large were content, according to a survey by networking giant, Cisco.

A survey covering 2,600 workers across 13 nations revealed that over a third of employees (41 percent) intentionally broke their company's IT policies to get the job done; that is, by using a banned application which they claimed was necessary for their work.

Just 31 percent of Australians broke policy for that reason, with only the UK, Japan and Italy reporting lower figures under this reason for breaching policy.

However Australians also felt - or at least believed - IT policies would be enforced. While 20 percent of respondents globally broke IT policy because they thought it was unlikely the company would enforce it, just 9 percent of Australians believed this to be the case.

Australians were more likely than other nations to break the IT policy because they were busy.

Mobile policies

Australian workers were also generally happy with their company's IT policies regarding mobile devices.

Across the board 64 percent thought their company needed to adjust policy, but most Australians (84 percent) reported there was no need for significant improvements.

In addition, no less than half the respondents from the US, Brazil, France, Russia, Spain, China, India and Japan said their company's mobile device policy needed updating, while just 37 per cent of Australians believed this needed to occur.

Restrictions on iPad, phone use

Despite Australians' satisfaction with IT policies, its workers were just as restricted as their peers in what they are able to use at work.

A quarter of Australian workers could not use their personal mobile phones for work, which was higher than all other nations except Spain.

And over a fifth of Australian workers - compared to the global average of 15 percent - were prevented from using their iPads at work.

Just under half of the Australians surveyed reported online games being banned, while 39 percent of Australians reported "social networking" (Facebook, You Tube) being banned -- both consistent with the average across the 13 nations.

Twitter was treated as a separate category and was slightly less frequently banned than other social media.

Almost a third of respondents said that the IT department never explained why a certain policy existed, according to Cisco.