Solving The Fundamental Challenges Of Today's Mobile Workers
By Matt Cutler, founder and CEO, Collaborate.com
According to Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report, there are about 1.5 billion global mobile subscribers, up from 1.1 billion a year before. It is no surprise then, that by 2015, IDC predicts that the world's mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion – that’s 37.2 percent of the total workforce.
However, even with the exponential growth of mobile, a recent study shows that more than half of enterprise users are dissatisfied with today’s collaboration tools.
The fact is, managing large teams in the field has become exceedingly complex, with a significant number of moving parts, people and projects to oversee; and while teams are becoming increasingly dispersed and less desk-bound, the pace of work only continues to ramp up. The good news is that new mobile technologies are making it easier than ever for the harried team leader to effectively organize and deploy teams on the go. Mobile, because it comes from the consumer side and helps us manage our personal lives on the fly, offers an easy learning curve in applying a device we already know to a new (business) context. Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the challenges teams face in the field and the way mobile tools can help solve those challenges while bolstering productivity.
1. The Communications Challenge: This is the most obvious challenge and one that remains the most difficult to conquer. Communicating with teams in the field often begins and ends with email. But, what we have found in working with a variety of clients is that the duration of time for communication about a task is often many times longer than the task duration itself. An e-mail could sit in your in-box for days before it is read, while the task it is connected to might only require five minutes to complete.
Over time, these communication lapses can add up to a significant amount of wasted time and productivity, and can impede projects being completed on time or even on budget. Thus, communicating with teams in the field requires an adjustment in communication styles. Where long, complex emails work in a deskbound setting, field communication requires smaller, more manageable directives. Shifting to smaller projects or “chunking” is a good strategy for managing successful projects in the field. It is a more natural way to work, and it fits better with the mobile environment we’re all moving towards.
2. The Document Challenge: For teams in the field, sharing and working together on documents is essential. Mobile tools exist to make it possible for even the most harried team member to be able to read, edit and comment on documents on-the-fly. Google Drive is a perfect example. Content lives in the cloud and can be edited just as easily from a desktop as a mobile phone. It’s a simple tool to help teams get on the same page and prevents loss of precious time emailing drafts back and forth.
The goal is to select tools that support real-time file creation and sharing and support our intuitive behavior. Evernote is perfect for this; its simple interface makes it easy to take notes, save web clips, files and images across all your devices. Team managers can use it to collect data and information from members in the field, who can update and edit their information in real time.
3. The Security Challenge: Security is a major concern for field-based teams. More and more companies are finding ways to offer secure technology across all mobile devices- ensuring that your documents are as secure in the cloud as they are on your desktop. Current trends are focusing on interactions outside the firewall.
Box lets you store all of your content securely online and integrates with both Google Apps and Salesforce on mobile devices. DropBox also allows you to save, share and edit documents in the cloud from a desktop or mobile phone, where you can put content and documents for easy access by other team members.
4. The Collaboration Challenge: The root of all difficulties associated with running a team in the field is the challenge of effective collaboration. Managers seeking to implement new processes for communication and sharing ultimately come up against the “Collaboration Gap” – the mismatch between simple end-user desires, frustrations inherent in the collaborative/social process, and the limitations of currently available solutions.
The only real solution to bridging the Collaboration Gap is simplicity – leveraging tools that combine the highest degree of communication, context and security with the least amount of additional effort. One of the best ways to do this is to use tools that are designed with the mobile worker in mind – or what we like to call “Micro-collaboration.” The goal of micro-collaboration technologies is to quickly and easily translate business workers’ mobile behaviors into intuitive applications – think push alerts for updates, chat for context, and places to store, and edit documents, all from one place. Micro-collaboration holds a tremendous amount of promise for workers in the field- it provides a more intuitive, expeditious and simple way to complete projects on the fly, and makes working from your smartphone as productive as sitting behind your desk.
With all the tools and apps now available, it’s never been easier to manage disparate teams, from any location. However, the key to successfully integrating mobile with your field team is simplicity. Mobile tools are now available to help team managers streamline their work processes, drawing on consumer’s mobile behaviors and preferences and creating simpler, more intuitive methods for working together, separately.
Matt Cutler is the founder and CEO of Collaborate.com.