Page 125 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

104 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

Technology
Empowering employees to work outside of the office, with secure
connections and affordable mobile equipment, allows access to pro-
prietary data, records, and information. Mobile employees, through
the use of technology, can maintain high levels of productivity when
working away from traditional brick-and-mortar offices because they
can have personal uninterrupted focus, less travel time, and secure
enterprise data access. The challenge isn’t so much finding the right
technology these days as it is keeping up with it!
What new opportunities for moving to mobility do emerging technolo-
gies offer your organization?

Global Competitiveness
Profit requirements often necessitate deeper penetration into regional
and global markets, requiring more travel and more customer rela-
tionship building. Technology allows the remote worker to be closer
to the client and to collaborate peer to peer and peer to group, when
needed. Access to critical information, contacts, and connectivity are
still the top tools that allow the mobile workers to compete.
What new opportunities for moving to mobility does this smaller, flatter
world offer your organization?

the path to a paradigm shift
Thinking of any one of the preceding factors opens up new prospects.
Thinking of the possibilities at the intersections between one or more
of these items can create completely new paradigms—new rules, as
mentioned in Chapter 2—at local, national, and even global scales.
This way of reflecting about the world, and indeed the new realities
of the world, leads to roads that did not exist before. Paradigm shifts
can completely change our thinking or belief systems and allow new
conditions previously thought to be impossible to become possible.
The recipe for a paradigm shift in how you manage your own
company starts by rethinking these possibilities. Consider how con-
necting people over time and space through the Internet, with VoIP,