Page 141 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

120 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

you will help employees realize their full potential through doing
work about which they are passionate, and doing it with people about
whom they care.
As this chapter relates, mobile performance management technol-
ogy has improved to the point that employers should no longer be
afraid that productivity will plunge when the workforce goes mobile;
they should instead be worried that they will lag far behind the com-
petition if they don’t incorporate a mobile strategy.
Performance management strategy has progressed in two equally
promising, though seemingly opposite, directions. One direction in-
volves using technology to improve performance by giving workers
less autonomy, that is, increasingly assigning them tasks and sched-
uling their work for them; the other gives workers more autonomy,
that is, increasingly giving them control over their own schedules and
tasks. Technology facilitates both strategies, and it enables perfor-
mance to improve. Both strategies result in an increasingly mobile,
high-performance workforce.

` why would Anyone slow hIs or
her employees down?

John Hale is a true road warrior. He often spends four or five days a
week on the road working in airports, hotels, and clients’ offices. He’s
the kind of person who, as he says, can land in Salt Lake and take two
conference calls while running through the airport.
His personal road has been circuitous too. He comes from a small
logging town, has earned a trade as an ironworker, spent time at the
U.S. Treasury office, and today provides advisory services to clients
across the country. He ran KPMG’s advisory practice in Latin Amer-
ica out of Mexico City before returning to the United States after
9/11. All of which prepared him to be the prototype mobile worker.
But he’s also a mobile manager. He’s a managing partner at KPMG,
with lots of road warriors who report to him.