Page 166 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

the mobile performance management process � 145

alized in any fashion. As we’ve seen in the previous chapter, more
and more performance management systems are doing just this. Some
tasks aren’t ready to be mobility enhanced quite yet, but you may be
surprised at how many are.
Now bundle those tasks into a job, or redesign jobs that you al-
ready have to represent these new, mobility-friendly tasks. Remind
yourself that these tasks—many now to be executed at a distance—
should enable the work to be completed as least as efficiently, quickly,
and cost effectively (or use any other organizational result measure) as
it was before. Ideally, they should improve productivity, and usually
they will, by a lot.

providing the work tools
Before you hire anyone or reassign anyone to a job, you’d better be sure
the mobility tools needed for success will be in place. Are you going to
need an Oracle (or Reflexis, or Mentor, or . . .) mobile workforce per-
formance management system for your field workers? Or will a mobile
phone and a netbook do? Will you need a knowledge management
system for that hardware, so your workers can share, update, and track
information either synchronously or asynchronously? What about col-
laborative tools? There’s no need to buy a bunch of gadgets you don’t
need—but you’d better have what you do need to facilitate perfor-
mance instead of obstructing it. You are, after all, the “Human API.”
We’ve now considered the results we want from this job, the tasks
that will be required to get those results, which of those tasks we can
mobilize, and what kind of hard- and software support your employ-
ees will need to get the job done. But we’d better think about what
kind of people we’ll need to fill that job too.

hiring
Now it’s time to think about hiring people, though in most organiza-
tions it may be that you are either redeploying people or retooling them
for this kind of mobile work. We’ll examine how to hire and prepare