Page 151 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

130 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

to communicate on the radio, less overall stress, fewer manual pro-
cesses, and less rework all add up to increased worker satisfaction for
customers of companies like Mentor Engineering, which offer mobile
workforce performance management systems.

` more Autonomy, hIgher perFormAnCe

Consider for a moment a worker’s dream result from being allowed to
work mobilely. First, you don’t have to drive to work. You can work
right out of your house, or in a coffee shop, or you might be on the
road and work out of your hotel room, or you might work in a cli-
ent’s office. You get to choose where you work. Second, you can work
when you want. If you have to drop the kids off to school, you can
do that, and then scoot back to the house to zip off a few e-mails. If
you need to go to a doctor’s appointment, there’s no problem, and you
don’t have to ask anybody for permission; you just go. Later that night
you’re on a conference call with someone in France, or Germany, or
China. Last, you get to work how you want. If you want to write on a
yellow pad and fax it to your teammates, you can. If you want to work
using the latest iPad, you can. If you like to videoconference, you can.
If it works best for you to meet once a month (or once a day, or once a
year), you can. The promise of mobile work is flexibility.
The question for managers has always been, “What will work-
ing mobilely do to performance?” The evidence is in, as we’ve seen
throughout this book, that moving to mobile work very often in-
creases performance. And, as we’ve seen earlier in this chapter, one
approach to improving performance is to use technology to manage
workers’ time very tightly, which can result in impressive performance
improvements. Let’s now consider another strategy that also increases
performance—letting employees do whatever they want, whenever
they want, as long as work gets done.