Mobile workforce management

Mobile workforce management

The shift to digital

Work from anywhere

About

A mobile workforce is a group of employees that isn’t bound by a central physical location. Instead, they are using portable, cloud based systems. The global mobile workforce is expected to reach 1.87 billion workers by 2021. 81% of CEO’s see mobile technologies are being strategically important to their organisation.

The objective of a mobile workforce is to make employees as productive outside of the office as when they are in it. With a mobile workforce, employees should be able to remotely access the same software applications and data as they would at headquarters. Microsoft teams is a great example of how technology has enabled and empowered the workforce, to work from anywhere.

Benefits

Costs

  • Minimal to no brick and mortar locations means reduced overheads.  

Talent pool

  • Mobile working can boost recruitment as the pool widens with the ability to recruit from anywhere.

Flexibility

  • A geo-dispersed workforce means greater opportunities to expand market reach and customer contact.

Challenges

The challenge is how to transform employee workspaces into secure, highly collaborative and productive environments, and allow employees to access critical business applications securely and remotely.

Enterprises must view their mobile workforces differently.

  • Users want to choose their own devices and they expect the kind of experience they have with consumer devices.

Organizations will need to support a greater range of devices.

  • Smaller, more portable devices, tablets and wearables are becoming primary work devices.

Millennial employees will soon be in the majority.

  • By 2025, roughly 70 percent of the global workforce will be Millennials or even younger. They expect instant access to information.

Connectivity

  • Being dispersed can reduce connectivity and idea formation.

Companies will more closely track assets — including workers.

  • As part of the duty of care requirements, employees can be monitored to guard against safety hazards such as fall detection, location tracking, hazard zones, insurance and regulatory compliance. Asset tracking benefits include workflow optimization, regulatory compliance, inventory management and asset-use optimization.

Conclusion

Mobile workforce management has been a trend in the making for some time, COVID19 simply accelerated it, rewarding those early adopters and punishing laggers. Review and assess today, what you can do in your organisation to implement value creating, long term mobile solutions.