Workforce Management Featured Article

Better Management of the Mobile Workforce

While the goals of the mobile workforce and bring your own device (BYOD) are lofty and rewarding – after all, they allow your employees unprecedented flexibility, they allow everyone to remain in touch in a very multimedia way regardless of location, and they even result in employees putting in more hours than they normally would if they were tied to a desk – they also have some drawbacks.

One of them is security. While BYOD is used by a variety of businesses today both large and small, some companies are seeing a hangover from too much personal and work digital device mixing. At the outset, few companies think about what will happen when that employee leaves, according to a recent blog post by Computing Canada’s Nestor E. Arellano.

“It’s all well and good when employees purchase their own equipment and opt to put in more hours and are able to work remotely,” writes Arellano. “However, one of the data security concerns companies have to face is when a worker resigns or is let go and the question arises as to whether there’s some corporate data in the personal device he or she is taking along.”

Many companies are solving this problem by writing up stringent BYOD rules and policies that employees must sign before they are permitted to access a business’ applications on their personal devices.

Another challenge companies are finding with an increasingly remote workforce is…how do you manage a group of mobile employees? The answer, it would seem, is “with difficulty.” A recent whitepaper by mobile workforce optimization solutions provider ClickSoftware (News - Alert) found that many companies are trying to do it manually.

“A vast majority [of companies] are maintaining a schedule manually, using a spreadsheet, whiteboard, or traditional/basic software-based calendar,” write the white paper’s authors. “The methods in place today are most likely the methods that got the company off the ground to start with. However, an increasing number of mobile employees and jobs per day means an increasing complexity in the scheduling possibilities.”

Luckily, workforce management is no longer just for the desktop. ClickSoftware outlines seven key benefits to moving to a mobile workforce management solution. These include:

Schedule optimization. While you may be able to manually build a schedule that will cover all your bases – barely – chances are good you will never be able to build a schedule that makes the most out of every asset.

Keeping track of human resources. When your employees are BYODing, they’re working and not playing golf, right? While no one likes to take a “Big Brother” approach, it’s smart to raise visibility and accountability for employees on the road.

Productivity. By making the best use of everyone’s time, companies can recover never before attained efficiencies that simply help the company run better and make the most out of the advantages of mobility. Company managers can be certain – in real-time – that the work is getting done, customer expectations are being met and no loose ends are being left to gum up service levels. Mobile workforce management solutions can also ensure that business objectives are being met.

The right solution has a variety of other benefits, including generating important business intelligence that can help companies refine their processes, boost efficiencies and please customers even further.

So if the drawbacks of BYOD and bumping up the mobile workforce are keeping your company from implementing a program that could frankly yield a dizzying array of benefits, the message is that you shouldn’t avoid it: just be sure to manage it properly.