Smartphones have penetrated every aspect of our lives, and this is profoundly changing how we live and work. From buying goods to making sales on our mobile devices, it is an understatement to say that smartphones have revolutionized the world.
One way that mobility has changed the game is in terms of working from the road. While Blackberry-toting executives have been checking email from the road for a couple of decades now, the widespread use of the iPhone and the Samsung (News - Alert) Galaxy has meant that every employee now is equipped to work from the road.
More than just checking email, employees now can perform just about every aspect of their work from their mobile devices.
This has profound implications for business. It changes how employees work and how employer’s need to support workers. Whether or not businesses enable their employees to work from the road, employees will be doing it anyway. Managers need to recognize this and make it both easy and safe for employees to work from their mobile devices.
One key to enabling mobile employees is having all business documents accessible via the cloud. This way, employees have all the necessary documentation in front of them, which saves time, and there is no need for kludges such as emailing themselves documents that can threaten the security of business documents.
It also is important to make sure that all corporate communications systems are mobile-ready. Some of this, such as email, already is easy to set up for mobile use. Other systems, such as business phone and fax, require a little forethought.
For business phone, the solution is moving to a voice-over-IP (VoIP) system. VoIP phone systems can be set to ring in the office, on mobile devices, or even to a home phone. This makes such phones perfect for the mobile worker; there’s no need for missed calls when out of the office, or business calls made from a personal cell phone.
For fax, the solution is fax-over-IP (FoIP). FoIP works similarly to VoIP, in that it works over the Internet instead of traditional phone lines. This enables workers to send faxes from their mobile phones or laptops, and to get incoming faxes via email.
FoIP has the twofold benefits of making faxes more mobile, and also making them more digital — which is good for our modern business workflows, which have decidedly moved away from paper.
Businesses can ignore this move to mobile working, or they can embrace it. The better choice is pretty obvious.