Maximizing Productivity with Mobile Workforce Planning Tools

If your business employs a large number of remote or mobile workers, managing your team can present a number of unique challenges, especially when it comes to workforce planning. But although managing a mobile team seems daunting, equipping yourself with the right tools can help you and other managers effectively oversee and optimize a workforce that’s always on the move. In this blog, we’ll outline some top-tier workforce planning tools designed to help managers stay organized, communicate effectively and efficiently with teams in the field, monitor the productivity and performances of employees, and keep track of mileage and other workforce expenses.

Top Workforce Planning Tools You Need to Have

Time Tracking and Attendance Systems

One of the biggest unique struggles of managing mobile employees is, of course, visibility. It’s hard to supervise teams you can’t see! When most of your employees are out in the field, 

supervisors and management typically lack a great deal of visibility, making it difficult to know that your employees are actually where they’re supposed to be and doing what they’re supposed to do. 

Mobile workers have been shown to appreciate having autonomy in the workplace. As their employer, you face the exciting challenge of needing to thread the needle of finding workforce planning tools that allow you insight and accountability into how your employees spend their time without sacrificing their freedom or self-sufficiency. 

So how do you hold your field employees accountable without breathing down their necks? With the right software, you can use location-based tracking to verify employees’ attendance via GPS. When employees mark their attendance, the tech will capture the exact date, time, and location coordinates. This information can be used to record timesheets, which can be especially useful for businesses employing hourly workers. 

Location-based attendance apps also let supervisors review and approve attendance without having to deal with manually created spreadsheets or paperwork. Most importantly, adding tracking and attendance systems to your workforce planning tools will help you accurately assess the performance of your workforce, while limiting opportunities for employees to falsify attendance records.

Collaboration Platforms

Communication, as we all know, is key. But when you’re managing a team of mobile employees all doing their own thing in different places, communication might slip through the cracks, or become a disorganized mess. It’s important that your employees be able to talk to each other throughout the day! However, you don’t want to have too many pathways for communication. Phone calls, text, emails – in the 21st century, there are a lot of ways to say hi! But if your business utilizes a way to centralize communication, your team will be all the stronger for it. 

With a centralized way to communicate, employees can share and respond to problems faster, make it easier to seek out and find the information they need, and all-around collaborate more efficiently. If you’re seeking a technology solution to make it easy for your team to communicate, email isn’t going to do the trick. Instead, seek out solutions that prioritize sharing information in a  quick and concise way. Software that uses simple messaging systems, clear notifications, and real-time synchronous communication will benefit your employees immensely. So will having an additional video conferencing option, if needed.

Mileage Tracking Tools

Tracking mileage is an oft-overlooked aspect of managing a mobile team of field employees, but think about it – mismanagement could wind up costing you a lot of money in mileage expense reimbursement! When it comes to looking at workforce planning tools for tracking employee mileage, consider your options.

You don’t want an app or digital tool that simply tracks all mileage. That option comes with the hassle of trying to determine which travel is work-related, requiring reimbursement, and which is personal. Paper logs might not be the best idea either. We live in the future, and paper needs to stay in the past if you want to avoid silly transcription or math errors. Paper mileage logs are way too easy to lose in the shuffle or damage – or your employees might just forget to fill them out! 

Instead, seek out a digital mileage tracking tool that tracks and records mileage in real time – but just business mileage, so nobody has to do any pesky math. Real-time tracking gets rid of the need to keep up with odometer readings for logs and spreadsheets. Digital tracking also reduces the risk of slip-ups and mistakes that can occur when manually tracking data. After all, you want your mileage tracking tool to be easy for everyone to use, whether they be employees, managers, or payroll admins. 

What Can CompanyMileage Do For You?

CompanyMileage knows that finding the best workforce planning tools for your mobile team of field employees can feel like a challenge. That’s why our suite of digital solutions, SureMilage, SureMobile, and SureExpense, are here to provide customers with an innovative solution for managing mobile workforce expenses. 

Utilize our easy-to-use web app, SureMileage, to see how much time employees spend driving and at each service location, so that managers can see how employees manage their time throughout the day. CompanyMileage also offers on-the-go expense tracking, easily managed from our SureMobile app. By calculating the mileage between the starting and ending points of each trip, our software ensures only work-related mileage is tracked, and employees never have to record odometer readings again. At the end of the day, it only takes a few minutes to submit expense reports, and then our system propels them through the approval process. Once a reimbursement is ready to be issued, our software integrates seamlessly with any major payroll and accounting systems, meaning payments can be issued in a timely manner. 

Managing field employees with maximum efficiency and productivity means having the right workforce planning tools. To access those tools, sign up for a free demo with CompanyMileage today!