Page 145 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

124 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

to acknowledge their willingness to do what I asked. I only want an
e-mail that tells me they won’t do what I ask and why.”

` Autonomy or no Autonomy? thAt Is the QuestIon

It is a good thing that effective mobile workforce managers have an
understanding of what motivates mobile workers (see Chapter 9) be-
cause technology is becoming so discriminating that the historic as-
sembly line, time-and-motion approach to improving worker perfor-
mance now seems pitifully rustic. Today, of course, managers can track
every keystroke we make on a computer, follow anything we look up
on the Internet, and peruse any e-mail—either work or personally re-
lated—we send or receive while on the job. In fact, companies today
not only look at what workers have done and are doing but also are
gathering massive amounts of employee data to build models to predict
what employees will do. Big Brother isn’t just watching you, sister, he
can pretty much figure out what you’ll do even before you do it.

The research being done now, tied to technology, will soon allow
management to make traditional job task analysis seem as outdated
as the early, clunky computers of the past. Organizations are becom-
ing increasingly sophisticated about understanding how to divide each