7 tips for mobilising your workforce

• Get it right and your business can improve productivity and performance
• Get it wrong and you can damage employee morale and lose ground to competitors

MOBILISING your workforce is one of the most important and far-reaching projects a business can undertake.
 
Get it right and your business can improve productivity and performance while becoming an ‘employer of choice’ for talented people.
 
Get it wrong and you can damage employee morale while losing ground to your competitors.
 
So what steps can your business take to get its mobility strategy right?

READ ALSO: 50% of people to use devices first when going online: Gartner
 
1) Align the objectives of your mobility project to those of the broader business
 
Doing this ensures the project contributes to a business’s productivity, culture and customer service goals, and helps secure the support of executives whose performance is measured on improvements in these areas.
 
This in turn helps secure project funding and buy-in from affected employees. If the objectives of the project are unclear or not properly aligned with those of the business, the chances of its success are dramatically reduced.
 
2) Implement a mobility ‘centre of excellence’
 
Establishing centres of excellence within their IT departments enables businesses to maximise the benefits of their mobility projects.
 
With these projects having an impact on most IT functions, including networking, application development and security, these centres of excellence should include representatives from each affected area.
 
These representatives then gain opportunities to discuss mobility in the context of their broader IT programmes, overcome barriers to adoption, and account for new technology developments.
 
3) Involve business and executive stakeholders in overseeing mobility projects

These projects impact a range of teams and functions within businesses, including management, procurement, sales and service.
 
This makes capturing each group’s mobility use cases and accounting for them in project planning and execution essential.
 
The most effective way of doing so is to have project teams report to a committee of representatives of each area of the business. That committee may in turn provide updates to the chief executive or senior leadership team.
 
This system of oversight – with project teams reporting as frequently as weekly or fortnightly – is also likely to ensure mobility projects proceed on schedule and meet all their milestones and objectives.
 
A rigorous oversight process is particularly important for mobility projects spanning multiple countries in Asia Pacific. Differences in language, culture, and technological maturity may influence how quickly mobility is deployed in each market.
  
4) Don’t skimp on change management or education
 
Mobility is much more than issuing a few tablets or smartphones to employees. Implemented properly, it transforms where, when, and how people work.
 
To maximise the value of mobility, businesses need to obtain buy-in from their workers, particularly older employees who may be less comfortable with change.
 
In addition, companies need to educate employees about how to be productive when working outside the office, including when to switch off and devote time to personal activities.
 
The education programme should also cover policies governing data security, including processes for informing IT of a lost or stolen device to enable them to activate remote wiping procedures.
 
5) Select the right channel partner
 
Choosing a channel partner is crucial in ensuring the smooth delivery of a mobility project. Businesses need to thoroughly check the track record and competence of prospective partners, and should insist they provide evidence of successfully completing similar mobility projects.
 
They should also check whether the partner provides consultative sale and implementation services; a consulting capability is rare but extremely valuable.
 
Businesses should also check whether a prospective channel partner can go beyond implementing an enterprise mobility platform to delivering value-added services such as application development.
 
An extremely valuable service a channel partner could provide is migrating Windows applications to iOS or Android tablets and smartphones.
 
Finally, the channel partner should have a proven deep knowledge of vendor products, including roadmaps for the future, and sound vendor relationships.
 
6) Choose the right vendor
 
Businesses also need to work with their channel partner to select the right vendor. Chosen suppliers should provide an end-to-end mobility platform, removing the requirement for third-party software to complete a mobility project.
 
The selected vendor should provide excellent support for its customers and partners, including 24 hour a day, seven days a week availability of technical employees to resolve issues.
 
7) Measure the outcomes and adapt mobility to changing circumstances
 
Expansion into new markets, mergers and acquisitions and new technologies are just some of the factors that can impact on mobility projects. Businesses need to be flexible enough to adapt these projects to changing circumstances.
 
In addition, regular or constant measurement of a mobility deployment enables businesses to quickly identify gaps or shortfalls and move to address them.
 
Mark Micallef is the Asean area vice president at Citrix.
 
Related Stories:
 
Design the enterprise with mobility in mind: Citrix
 
Securing enterprise mobility in Malaysia’s BYOD world
 
Your own ‘Personal Digital Advantage’ in the workplace
 
APeJ enterprise mobility market to grow 29%: IDC
 
 
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