Addressing the Challenges Faced By Mobile Employees

Remember working from the office? Do you, though? The ubiquitous image of workers at lines of desks inside a towering office building has been inescapable in our collective consciousness for years, but it is rapidly becoming less and less of a reality in today’s workforce. Only 20% of employees around the world actually sit and work at their desks in the offices you’re used to seeing when you turn on the TV! The majority of the workforce more accurately fits into a category we’ve only just started to put a name to: mobile employees. 

This legion of deskless, mobile employees includes independent contractors, home healthcare providers, technicians, and a range of other jobs that must be done on site at different locations throughout a work day. Despite their number, and their necessity to the workforce, these mobile employees are often overlooked, as are the numerous issues they may face daily. By identifying and addressing these issues, employers can ensure their workers get the resources they need to perform their jobs as efficiently and with as little stress as possible.

Challenges Faced by Mobile Employees

Communication

The most immediate challenge a worker with a mobile job faces is accessing a network of easy and effective communication with the rest of their company. For mobile employees, modes of communication tailored to a stationary setting have rendered themselves inconvenient, or even impossible. A mobile home healthcare aide who spends all day traveling, visiting patients and tending to their needs can’t simply walk the six feet to a coworker’s desk, or call an impromptu office meeting if they or their peers have an issue that needs to be immediately addressed.

Instead, these workers and those that employ them may find themselves looking for technology solutions that give them effective ways to solve problems, communicate with coworkers and provide quick and easy updates even when they’re on-the-go. Employees with resources that give them these methods of communication are well-connected to their peers, their immediate managers and supervisors, and administrative staff, giving them higher job satisfaction and consequently motivating them to be more efficient and productive at work.

Integration

Another complex challenge that presents itself is integrating necessary technology and systems with existing workflows. Some mobile workers could find themselves needing to use multiple systems due to the nature of their jobs, while in-office workers may have simpler or more streamlined solutions. This issue has the potential to create frustration and widen the gulf between deskless workers and operations teams. 

By using an integrated mobile workforce management system, deskless workers can mitigate these issues. They eliminate the need to juggle several apps and platforms, creating a single, manageable source for notes, customer histories, and more vital data. Access to scheduling, real-time updates and easy and seamless data sharing, will also serve to mitigate several of the more frustrating challenges presented by integration.

Accountability

When workers spend most of their time outside the office, lines of visibility to which employees are performing which responsibilities become less clear, especially in a workforce made up of a hearty blend of part-time employees, full-time workers and independent contractors. While this flexibility may complicate accountability, mobile employees are shown to appreciate having autonomy in the workplace, and employers face the exciting challenge of finding a solution that addresses these issues without sacrificing the freedom employees appreciate.

Mobile-First Technology

In a global workforce that finds itself increasing and necessarily integrating multiple forms of technology, that technology could have the potential to make or break a workplace with a high volume of mobile employees. Tech lacking the necessary design and user experience features could have a serious impact on a workplace’s productivity. Additionally, mobile workers who need to use this technology constantly will have the same expectations for their work devices that they would for the devices they have at home, but they could fall through the cracks when their managers and supervisors, who don’t use these resources every day, don’t prioritize UX or ease of use. 

In order to survive and thrive in a rapidly mobilizing and technologizing environment, modern companies need to prioritize solutions that recognize and cater to the unpredictability their mobile employees will face while on the job. The same way we expect the tablets we use to play Fruit Ninja in front of the TV after work to be intuitive and easy to use, workplace apps for deskless workers need to have an intuitive interface that minimizes headaches and scrambling over their workday, with access to data and updates in real-time. In short, a mobile worker’s tech should be as flexible and adaptable as the service they’re providing! 

Address These Needs with CompanyMileage

For employers with a sizable mobile workforce, expense management is an important consideration. Most of the processes associated with expenses and employee reimbursements are well-managed by technology with the notable exception of mileage reimbursement. Without the right technology, tracking and reporting mileage for large numbers of on-the-go mobile employees could prove itself time-consuming and difficult.

Luckily, SureMileage and its mobile app, SureMobile, will streamline mileage reimbursement for mobile workers, their management, and accounting administrators. Instead of verifying the miles that were driven, our trip log solution cuts out the middleman by calculating expenses to be reimbursed. Employees simply report their starting point and destination—a task made even faster with our Quick Capture feature—and SureMileage calculates the driving distance between them. At the end of the day, employees simply take a few minutes to submit their trips, and our system manages your approval workflow automatically. 

Our method is not only faster and more reliable than other, similar methods, but also allows you to gain insights into employees’ activities and their time management. With the ability to see trips as soon as they’re booked in our system, you can see how employees are spending their workdays, follow their schedules, and identify any areas where improvements can be made, such as changes to route planning. In our system, you can also set up flags to alert you of instances of duplicate trip bookings, employees reporting excess mileage, and overrides in the system.

While an increasingly mobilizing workforce provides unique challenges and potential difficulties, understanding the best way to mitigate these issues allows for the continued satisfaction, efficiency, and flexibility of mobile employees. To further explore these options, schedule a demo with CompanyMileage today!