Page 205 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

184 � mAnAgIng the moBIle workForCe

You don’t want them to bad mouth the company when they are with
others or to sabotage your efforts, right? Are these behaviors impor-
tant to you? Wouldn’t you want the best workers to come to you first
when they have employment choices? When employees go above and
beyond the call of duty they are exercising what are called “organiza-
tional citizenship behaviors”—OCBs—and it takes more than money
to earn them from your employees. 2
What is different about motivating mobile workers from motivat-
ing those who are located together? The answer: not much in content,
but lots in magnitude. People are human, and what naturally moti-
vates them won’t change just because they are using a mobile device.
It doesn’t matter where we are located, most of us like recognition for
our good work, doing what we find meaningful and interesting, and
collaborating with people who are fun and from whom we can learn.
Most people become demotivated when they aren’t rewarded for
their work, when they are in a toxic work environment, and when
they don’t have the tools to get the job done. Obstacles to completing
our work—exacerbated by working at a distance—cause motivation to
plummet. We are all the same in what gets us going and what stifles
us. Working at a distance just makes it harder to provide the good
stuff and to banish the bad. Managers need to take more—not less—
time to build the right motivational environment. As Steve Lamont,
the CEO of Wifi.com, told us, “I’ve seen a whole bunch of failed
experiments where companies put the wrong technology in the hands
of people who weren’t ready for it or the job, and it all crashed and
burned.” How motivating do you think those organizations were?
3
So, people are motivated and demotivated for many of the same
reasons no matter where they are, and therefore it’s critical that man-
agers know what those causes are. The mobile workforce is no dif-
ferent than any other group of working people except that distance
means that managers are going to have to be even better at applying
those motivational principles, and also more committed to applying
them on a much larger basis.