How to take your business mobile

The steady transition from desk-bound to mobile working has forced businesses to rethink their IT and HR strategies, throwing up questions as diverse as “what technology do we need?” and “can I trust people to work away from the office?”

Read on for answers to these questions and more.

The most useful thing about mobile technology is that it removes periods of frustrating inactivity from your business – including evenings and at weekends – and allows businesses to carry on moving forward when key people are away from their desks.

Other benefits include helping staff to work flexibly – increasingly a key ingredient of a happy workforce; promoting cohesion between disparate teams and allowing for quick decisions regardless of where people are in world.

In general, it will make your business more efficient and should help to increase turnover by helping you to complete tasks faster and with improved communication.

Is there a downside?

Always-on technology can create an ‘always on’ management team, which could cause burn-out of your senior employees if it isn’t managed properly.

The increase in technology – handsets and devices – required to keep a business mobile enhances the threat to data security, especially if you allow staff to use their own devices to access the company network.

Keeping tabs is harder when people are not sitting in front of you and any businesses employing mobile working will need to come up with a strategy for checking in regularly with remote employees.

For best results, plan

As with everything in business, it pays to plan your next move. A strategy for mobile business will focus on IT (the kit you need to buy) and HR (who you will give it to and what you will instruct them to do with it).

Your budget – or the amount you are prepared to spend on upgrades – will help to form the parameters of the process and ideally should set the bar at a point at which your investment should be returned.

You need to consider why you are going mobile, what benefits it is likely to bring, who should be provided with which new freedoms and what technology they should be supplied with.

The general aim is to increase the business’ efficiency without risking a data rupture, so keep this essential goal in mind while drawing up your plan.

Write it into law

The last thing to do with your plan is write it into the contracts of recruits and to communicate what constitutes good and bad behaviour with a set of written company rules. Only by sharing your goals and rules can you expect a cohesive start to your new mobile era.