Managing the mobile workforce: Do you have the right people? Do you have the right plan?

In my last post, I looked at the dangers of “analysis paralysis” – where misguided managers attempt to micromanage mobile workforce employees by monitoring their every move. This results in an electronic jail that can make employees and managers equally miserable.

The problem isn’t the tools – it’s that today’s managers need to be prepared to manage a mobile workforce. Our goal as managers is to make informed decisions, and the key to effective use of Unified Communications (UC) isn’t in the technology, but in its deployment. Used correctly, UC can promote collaboration, efficiency, productivity, and accountability.

For instance, UC lets you have live meetings and share information across groups, with everyone looking at the same document, for instance. If you want, you can have video on top of that – so you can pull a team together no matter where they are. You can monitor individual activity in Office Communicator to determine availability. You can share Outlook calendars in order to see what’s on each person’s plate and to can make interactions more productive. Managers can see what their people are doing and take accountability for their time and productivity in a collaborative, supportive way.

These are just some of the work processes that UC supports. To take advantage of everything UC offers while avoiding the pitfalls of micromanagement, managers need to do two things:

1. You need to hire the right people. When you hire workers who will be working remotely, you need to find people who have the right work ethic to work independently. If your remote employees are self-starters and problem-solvers, then you won’t feel the need to monitor their every move.

2. You need a mobility plan. This is where you lay out what the manager is looking for and the expectations employees are being held to. These expectations need to be clearly conveyed to mobile employees. Then the manager and employees can use mobile workforce tools to support the plan, not play games of electronic hide and seek.

–Michael Haines

Michael Haines is Chief Information Officer for CXO Global Solutions.