Mind the Gaps: Achieving Mobile Productivity

At this point, most of us are mobile. In fact, according to one source, 73 percent of us work out of the office at least occasionally. However, letting employees use mobile devices doesn’t magically transform them into a mobile workforce and using a mobile device doesn’t necessarily mean we’re all productive. Yet this is the way many organizations seem to be instituting mobility. This method leads to big gaps that swallow up productivity. Let’s look at four of those gaps and how to fill them.

The Right Connectivity

Organizations rarely, if ever, provide mobile employees with data plans. This means employees have to spend time hunting for Wi-Fi while on the road or use their personal plans. And while some employees may have unlimited personal data, their providers may throttle them when they reach certain levels. These scenarios can slow productivity to a crawl. A truly mobile workforce will have everything it needs to work, wherever it is. No hunting for Wi-Fi, no bandwidth throttling.

The Right Applications

With over a million apps in the Apple App Store alone, how can I say that employees don’t have the apps they need? Because employees don’t need yet another Angry Birds clone. They need apps that give them access to enterprise resources like customer resource management systems, corporate mainframes or databases. But it’s clear they’re not getting apps that work for them. Only 26 percent of smartphone users and not quite 20 percent of tablet users report that they use the corporate mobile apps their company provides, according to eWeek. Worse still is that these employees report their productivity suffers as a consequence. Clearly, a mobile workforce requires the right kind of apps to be productive.

The Right Desktop-Like Functionality

According to Microsoft, the number one request from users of the new Microsoft Office for iOS mobile devices wasn’t integration with wearable devices or some other fancy new feature. It was printing. That’s because for most of the working world, printing is still essential.

TechNavio agrees, claiming that printing is the most-requested feature in mobile devices, and a Wired Innovation Insights post claims that “In many companies, IT has misjudged the need for hard copy documents and is realizing that employees need to print from these devices.” Your mobile workers can’t just click “print” from their devices unless you give them a tool to make it happen.

The Right Access to Files

According to a recent survey, 77 percent of U.S. workers are not completely satisfied with the remote access capabilities they’re given. Users simply can’t do work without access to the documents, spreadsheets, images and other files on the corporate network or their office computers. And while many organizations say they’ve implemented ways of viewing files on employee devices, less than half have provided ways to edit those documents, according to a Forrester report. To make the files they need portable, many employees turn to Dropbox and other similar services. Unfortunately, these services do little to manage the risks inherent to file sharing in a business context.

Mobile workers need a way to access files that is easy and convenient; it would also be nice if they didn’t have to copy every file they need from corporate network shares into their Dropbox folder. How many copies of those files does IT want sitting in the public cloud? And even more important, mobile workers need access to these files in a way that protects the intellectual property the employees produce and protects the organization from data leaks.

It doesn’t matter how many of your employees are running around with tablets and smartphones; you don’t have a truly mobile workforce until that workforce has all the tools it needs. That means a constant connection to the right applications and files, as well as the ability to edit and print those files. Give your employees all of this and your organization will begin to realize that mobility isn’t just a buzzword, but rather an incredible means for productivity.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1ozDdWk