The mobile workforce is set to rise to 1.87 million by 2022. This projection, reported by Strategy Analytics, accounts for nearly half of the global workforce.
This mobility ushers in a lot of advantages and benefits for businesses—cost-efficiency and a wider talent pool to name a few. It can also present new challenges. For instance, monitoring teams in different geographic locations can be difficult. Without the ability to keep a close eye on remote team members, maintaining team motivation becomes a challenge.
To that end, we’ve rounded up four proven ways to increase mobile workforce productivity.
#1. Facilitate seamless team collaboration
A lot of productivity issues stem from communication errors and the remote team’s inability to effectively collaborate with colleagues. Remember, a mobile workforce means you have employees that rarely see each other in person. This makes it harder to establish rapport between employees, which could result in each one working in silos.
Your goal is to build a cohesive team despite the distance, which can be accomplished with the help of the best collaboration tools, like a GoToMeeting video solution. You’ll see an increase in mobile workforce productivity when you provide the necessary tools for collaboration and communication.
#2. Focus on company culture
Office culture is critical to the values that drive your team’s productivity; however, it’s easy to forget this when your employee base is scattered worldwide.
Ensure open communication between team members by providing them with proper tools and platform to communicate. Another way would be to introduce programs that highlight work/life balance such as mandatory recreation time.
#3. Check in on your team
Remote employees require a lot of discipline and focus, especially since managers aren’t able to keep track of individual team members the same way as sharing a physical space. Some days, it’s easy to achieve. Other times, employees need a little bit of a push. When remote workers rarely hear from colleagues and managers, it can have a negative impact on their work.
Knowing they’re still part of a team that can impact the overall output and bottomline of a business, helps ensure quality work. The best way to facilitate this is through regular contact with team members, whether it is for coaching, feedback, or even a simple chat.
#4. Empower them with technology
It’s difficult to be productive when your team members are required to use complicated tools that can be disruptive to their work processes.
For instance, some companies require team members to stay in touch throughout the day using a messaging app. And then they also have to manually log in their hours via another platform, like Google Sheets. This makes the entire monitoring process tedious and time-consuming. The tools you’re using to keep everyone productive might be taking them away from the actual work at hand instead.
An easy way to go about this is by using a centralized unified communications platform that streamlines communication, tracks work and data, monitors schedules, and does all of this efficiently. Solutions like Hosted VoIP can ensure efficient communication with team members anywhere in the world. And unified communication platforms can centralize data and monitoring which facilitate mobile workforce productivity.
If you would like your company to experience the flexibility and collaboration that Hosted VoIP can provide, get in touch with us today.
