Strategies For The Emerging Mobile Workforce

Strategies For Managers Of Mobile Workers Painting a rosy picture of mobile workers without examining some of the risks and challenges would be irresponsible. Risk and benefits are often closely related. A benefit for one manager may be a risk for another. In the next two sections we look at a few of the risks and challenges associated with mobile workers.

• Potential Decrease in Productivity
Fears abound on this one. Can someone really work at home and be productive? What about all of the distractions? Then there are moments in projects or employees’ job responsibilities that require tight synchronization that is next to impossible to coordinate with the separation of distance and or time. If Cindy takes thirty minutes in the middle of her day to do yoga will that make her less productive? Opinions may vary but from Cindy’s perspective the answer is obvious. As long as people do not abuse the flexibility extended to them and we design workflows that support mobile workers, this concern of a decrease in workers’ productivity may be more irrational than many of us want to admit. Tied to loss of productivity is a deeper and more difficult issue: the loss of control and oversight. If you are migrating from a traditional workforce to a mobile one, you undoubtedly are reinventing your job as a manager. What you managed before was concrete. What you manage now is less tangible. This is not trivial. Essentially, managers are faced with no longer knowing how to do their jobs. Managers know their business but they are foreigners in an alien world of work. Well-designed workflows can mitigate some of these issues. Managers also need to reengineer their jobs and negotiate new performance management metrics with their bosses. Most of all, managers need to be patient with themselves and others. Mobile workers change the way we manage. It takes time to sort out all the rules of a new game and their implications.

• Influence Replaces Positional Power
Positional power exerts less influence with mobile workers. Without the daily four walls of an organization, remote workers are unlikely to perform their jobs in prescribed ways. Managers need strong influence skills. Since influence skills are relational in nature it takes to time cultivate the trust and interpersonal connections associated with them. Time is not always on our side. Lapses in management styles that revert to more coercive techniques may achieve short-term objectives but ruin managers’ chances of building strong twoway influential relationships with employees. There are no short cuts and the amount of energy and creativity it takes to cultivate influence with remote workers is one of the most difficult aspects of managing mobile workers.

• Fragile Project Dependencies
Coordinating deliverables with offsite employees, contractors, vendors, and partners is a risk familiar to all project managers. These risks need to be identified at the front end of a project and managed throughout its life cycle. As a general rule, the greater the number of dependencies assigned to resources less in your direct control, the larger your contingencies need to be. Even non-project-related work will naturally be prone to more delays with mobile workers. In both of these instances central project management can be subdivided into smaller areas of ownership. Create informal subgroupings around clusters of resources tied to a deliverable. This gives autonomy and increased flexibility to the people most affected by project dependencies.

• Information Sharing
The reduction of face-to-face interactions hampers information sharing. Many organizations are culturally challenged when it comes to sharing information. Isolation experienced by mobile workers compounds these tendencies. Technology can play a powerful role in addressing these challenges and can even nudge cultures towards more information-sharing practices.
Author:Terrence L. Gargiulo, the paper is supplied by Citrix Online