Mobile Workforce Management Made Easy

For some businesses, certain work can only happen on site. Home care aides, for example, visit patients at their homes. They and employees in other industries like sales and real estate who travel as part of their work-related duties make up a mobile workforce. 

For people who manage mobile employees, it can be challenging to get visibility into a worker’s status, productivity, or whether they need help. Mileage adds another challenge. A company that chooses to reimburse its mobile workforce for business mileage needs an accurate, detailed mileage count to ensure each employee receives the correct amount.

Managing a mobile workforce gets easier when a company has a clear process for every challenge. In this article, CompanyMileage explains how to support your mobile workforce while they’re away from the office, keep them safe, monitor their productivity, and accurately reimburse their work-related mileage. 

Supporting Employees in the Field

Supporting a mobile workforce starts with making information and tools available to employees, even when they’re on the go.

Make Policies and Procedures Accessible

Processes designed for traditional work settings like a shared office (how retro!) assume that employees can just turn to a coworker or manager for an answer in person when they need it. 

Your mobile workforce will need more than that, like an accessible reference they can check on their own. 

That reference needs to include policies and procedures (especially your reimbursement and travel policies) that employees rely on the most, covering information like:

• How to log and submit trips for mileage reimbursement
• What to do in case of an emergency, or if a visit feels unsafe
• Which devices are approved for work-related use
• Who to contact with a question while they’re on the road or mid-visit

Keep that information clear and concise, and keep it accessible. Keep those documents in a shared digital folder that employees can access from their phones. 

Move Scheduling to a Mobile App

Can members of your mobile workforce open their work schedules from their mobile devices? If they can’t, they lose access to scheduling data the moment they leave the office.

Switch to mobile software that includes scheduling information, so mobile workers can know where they’re supposed to be, no matter where they are. 

Secure the Devices Employees Use 

Mobile employees often use their personal phones or laptops to work (or to track work-related mileage). Without the proper precautions, this can put company and client data at risk.

This is especially true for mobile employees who work in the healthcare industry. In those cases, information about the next client home visit, such as the patient’s name and address, also qualifies as protected health information (PHI) under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA.)

Let’s say your mobile workforce includes home health aides, for example, and an aide keeps client data/PHI on her phone. If the method she uses to store that information fails to meet HIPAA security requirements, the consequences (including fines and regulatory or potential legal trouble) will fall directly on your organization.

Maintain compliance by requiring mobile employees to keep track of every device–company-owned or personal–they use for work. Make device tracking part of your formal company policy.

That should include updated security on all devices, software and apps used by your mobile workforce. Depending on your industry, consult your IT and legal experts to set security procedures. 

Set Up Real Time Communication

In Forbes’ 2023 State of Workplace Communication Report, a survey of over 1,000 workers found that 54% of remote workers reported that poor communication impacted their trust in leadership. 52% said it impacted their trust in their team. 

Even when your employees are on their own, they shouldn’t feel like they’ve been left alone. They can always email you, and vice versa, but that moves a little too slowly for a worker who needs an answer in between client visits. Other tools you could use to communicate with a mobile workforce include:

• Messaging tools that support real-time conversation
• Video conferencing options
• Cloud-based file storage, so workers can consult regulations and policy documents from any location 

Keeping Mobile Employees Safe on the Job

Something that gets discussed less when we talk about the challenges and responsibilities of managing a mobile workforce is keeping them safe over the course of their workdays. 

Many mobile workforce roles carry a higher risk of workplace violence than office jobs do.

In an early 2026 report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses recorded 77,780 serious nonfatal workplace violence injuries (in 2023). The healthcare and social assistance sector accounted for most of that total. 

That specific sector carries a violence rate of 17.1 per 10,000 full-time equivalent workers; For psychiatric aides specifically, that rate is 543.6 per 10,00 FTE. The risk of workplace violence for home healthcare workers is in fact notable enough that the CDC has a workplace violence prevention guide for workers in that sector. 

We’re not saying that you or your mobile workers (especially in healthcare and social services) should live in fear. What we are saying is that by the very nature of a mobile workforce, employees will regularly face uncertain situations and environmental factors outside their control. 

What can you do to help them?

Prepare the Environment

Your employees should know exactly where they’re going and how they’re getting there, so make sure they have an accurate address and an ideal route for every location they visit as part of their work-related travel. 

If possible, restrict working hours for employees to daylight hours and mandate that they regularly check in with their location throughout the day. 

This is another area where providing mobile workforce tools is a good idea. Some companies go so far as to require digital workforce tools with constant GPS location tracking, but that’s probably not necessarily. Other, less intensive options let employees share their locations as necessary, without leaving the GPS on 24/7. 

Institute Administrative Protocols

If you haven’t done it already, create a safety plan for your mobile workers. Include policies and procedures for assessing and reporting threats. 

Those policies should include:

• A way for employees to report incidents or anything that makes them feel unsafe
• Guidance on how reports will be handled/investigated
• Information about how to recognize what is and isn’t violence
• Actions that the company has taken to keep them safe on the job
• Instructions on how to properly use security devices 

Educate Employees

Safety policies should arrive hand in hand with training and education initiatives that will equip employees with the skills they need to keep themselves safe in a risky situation. Keep that training specific. Address hazards associated with the locations employees are likely to visit, and the tasks they’re likely to carry out.

The most important education you can give employees focuses on nonviolent response and conflict resolution, like how to defuse and deescalate a situation, how to spot signals of impending violent assault, and avoiding behaviors that could be interpreted as aggressive. 

Measure Mobile Workforce Productivity 

While mobile employees are out in the field, managers and supervisors still need some insight into what they’re actually doing, and how much work is getting done. There’s no supervision at each jobsite, which can make it difficult to gauge the actual output of a mobile workforce. 

Mileage tracking and reporting software can help by providing companies with specific, measurable data over the course of each employee’s workday.

Set Productivity Standards From Trip and Appointment Records

Measures worth tracking include:

• The average distance employees travel between appointments
• Time employees spend at each work-related destination
• Number of assignments an employee completes in one day

Use your team’s real numbers to set productivity standards for each measure. Then share those standards so employees know how you’ll assess their performance. 

Over time, compare data from your mobile workforce against the standards you set. Does an employee consistently spend more time at appointments than expected? Or, is their reported mileage not lining up with the number of assignments they’ve completed? Time for a follow-up. 

Reimbursing Employees for Mileage 

Trip records help companies know where their mobile workforce goes and what they do. For companies that reimburse employees who use their personal vehicles for work-related travel, mileage records also help them calculate accurate reimbursement payments.

The IRS Accountable Plan Rules

According the rules of an IRS accountable plan, a mileage reimbursement is accountable (ie: nontaxable) when it meets the following criteria:

• The trip serves an explicit business purpose 
• Employees submit accurate and timely records for each trip
• Employees return any reimbursement that exceeds the documented business expenses within a reasonable time period 

If your mobile workforce doesn’t meet the requirements, the IRS treats the reimbursements as taxable wages. 

To keep employees and reimbursements accountable, many companies have their mobile workforce submit records in the form of IRS-compliant mileage logs. Each work-related trip needs a corresponding log entry stating the trip’s date, destination, business purpose, and mileage.

The Tracking Method Matters

The IRS doesn’t have strict rules about how employees track mileage, or what form a mileage log should take. A company that has its mobile workforce track mileage by subtracting odometer recordings and recording them by hand in a paper mileage log (or a manual-entry mileage spreadsheet) is, technically, compliant. 

But just because a method is technically allowed doesn’t mean you have to use it, or even that you should. Manual mileage methods have a wide margin for error (especially if you’re making your employees do math). 

Paper reports make it easy to submit duplicate mileage claims or to try to claim reimbursement on ineligible mileage, such as personal trips and commutes, because it’s then up to supervisors and finance teams to (manually) catch and fix those things.

If they don’t, that inaccurate mileage ends up in the reimbursement. Hardly a good use of anyone’s time, or your organization’s money. 

Why Automation Matters

Have you considered automation? 

Keeping track of mileage without the help of technology is tough enough that many employees will choose not to do so; they’ll pay the costs themselves over going through the ordeal of manually tracking expenses. 

More and more businesses with a mobile workforce are instead turning to automated solutions for travel and expense management, such as mileage reimbursement software.

Employees who use software to record work-related trips as they happen have no reason to estimate miles later, or recreate entire days or weeks of entries from memory. Many of these digital solutions have mechanisms for flagging noncompliant behavior, like duplicate reporting, making it easier for managers to catch and fix mistakes (and instances of fraudulent behavior).

Your mobile workforce gains from automated reimbursement solutions as well. Automated solutions for reimbursement remove most of the admin associated with tracking and logging mileage, so workers can focus on doing their actual jobs. 

Manage Your Mobile Workforce with CompanyMileage 

Field employees in industries like sales, healthcare, and real estate work most of the day outside of the office, with no manager nearby. You need a system you can trust that helps keep communication open between your mobile workforce and your office, and helps you manage reimbursement without requiring hours of time-consuming paperwork. 

SureMileage, by CompanyMileage, streamlines mileage reimbursement for mobile workers, their managers and accounting administrators. Rather than verifying mileage after the fact, SureMileage uses the start and end points of each work trip to calculate the best route between them. From there, it automatically calculates the mileage against a pre-set mileage rate, easily finding the amount for reimbursement. 

Our mobile app, SureMobile, puts automation and ease of use directly into your mobile workers’ hands. With three tiers of security and data protection, one-touch mileage reporting, and centralized recordkeeping, employees will always have what they need right there on their phone. 

At the end of the day, employees just need to take a few minutes to organize their trips and photograph any necessary documents and receipts. They can then use SureMobile to submit expense reports from wherever they happen to be. 

Once submitted, expense reports move quickly and easily through our automated expense approval system, which is easily customizable to meet the structure of your business. CompanyMileage’s systems integrate with all major accounting and approval software, guaranteeing fast, accurate reimbursements every time.

To learn more about how CompanyMileage can help your business manage its mobile workforce, and maybe even save you money in the process, contact us for a demo today!