Page 196 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

hiring and preparing great mobile talent � 175

The practice of transferring knowledge into the workforce comes
down to operating effectively with less face-to-face communications
and leading with business objectives in mind. The ROI delivered
by the training department is based how well it prepares the mobile
workforce to manage and solve issues, many of which are related to
the human element and relationships.
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Profile of a Mobile Leader
We interviewed an executive from a national insurance
company. He is a market claims manager with their national
event and catastrophe team, and is responsible for hun-
dreds of mobile workers; at any one time his responsibil-
ity could scale to a thousand field agents working within a
community that is recovering from a disaster such as a hur-
ricane or some other big destructive event. His teams are
called on at a moment’s notice to assess damage and help
people put their lives back together again. According to him:

One thing that could be constantly improved is how we commu-
nicate down to our frontline. You can send an e-mail to everyone,
but you don’t know if they read them and understand them. It is
difficult to measure how well people are getting that type of in-
formation. The reality is, if we don’t do our jobs right, we put the
company at risk. We put the local agents and their relationships
with their customers at risk. There is a lot riding on this, so we’ve
got to do it right.
We’ve got hundreds of people in this mobile workforce, and
they are all assigned in small groups. It is kind of like the army.
You’ve got a small group assigned to a sergeant, or what we call
a “front-line performance leader” or a “front-line manager.” What
tends to happen is [that] as we send people out we’re analyzing
the events that happened to a local market. What could easily