The growing expansion and usage of mobile technologies are blurring the lines between work and home – ideally, as we are now empowered to work from anywhere on earth. As companies are exploring new horizons of a ‘mobile first’ world, employees are leveraging the influx of smartphones, tablets, and other handheld devices while carrying on with their work on-the-go – meeting customers, offering on-field services, enabling sales, reaching out to stakeholders, driving and transferring goods, managing workflows, tracking processes and so on. Connect, collaborate, communicate and control – these have become the 4 keywords associated with a successful enforcement of a mobile workforce.

According to Forrester, ‘By 2020, the mobile workforce population is expected to reach 105 million—nearly three-quarters of the total U.S. workforce.’ So, what are those few significant factors that a company must consider, to drive a successful mobile workforce?

1. Understand business needs and employee mindset and find a way to sync them both

The first step to having a successful mobile workforce is to ensure that your company really needs one! The core objectives behind letting your employees work from anywhere, anytime should be to enhance customer service, promote employee productivity and grow business revenues while ensuring relevance, accuracy, and security of enterprise data and customer information. This involves having a clear communication between the employees and the IT leaders, where the later must convey the set of expectations, deliverables and company regulations with utmost clarity.

Second, the right deployment option must be determined to know if the company can implement BYOD as a practice or will deploy COPE (company owned personally enabled) as a strategy. This will further help to regularize the entire mobile landscape for the company and its employees. Employees must feel a combined sense of freedom as well as answerability while working in an environment of enterprise mobility.

Also, it is also important to ensure that your workforce is well-trained and well-versed with terms and concepts like Mobile Device Management (MDM), Mobile Application Management, Enterprise Mobility Management, Endpoint Management, and similar mobile computing technologies. The other considerable factors are to use data to evaluate the workforce’s performance and to select key metrics to drive your business outcomes.

2. Calculate the challenges and seek resolutions to cut through the barriers

The next vital thing is to assess all barriers and challenges in adopting the concept of a mobile workforce. IT leaders and CTOs must lay a foundation of foolproof and seamless processes, frameworks and workflows when it will come to confront challenges like,

Resistance to technology: There might arise some friction within a company when a specific technology gets introduced for the first time. However, management and IT leaders must act patiently under these situations and should take proper measures to educate, inform and train the workforce with hands-on coaching to use certain enterprise tools, devices, and applications within a specific deployment system. The fact that technology rather eliminates complexity to drive simplicity and convenience must be instilled on the employees’ minds.

Ensuring device and data security: Company-wide and technology-driven measures and regulations must be introduced to ensure that a mobile workforce doesn’t raise management and security concerns in terms of company-owned devices, corporate information, and customer data. Apt procedures such as implementing strict security rules and limited control, user identities and authentication, secure access to corporate network and data may be applied at the right levels.

Choosing the right MDM solution: Whether your mobile workforce is using their own devices or the ones owned by the company, it is crucial to set up a flawless process to secure, manage and supervise the devices remotely with the help of a well-integrated, robust and powerful MDM solution. So, choosing the right MDM solution provider is somewhat a challenge, which needs to be evaluated with proper consideration.

Enhancing user experience: The success of your on-field workforce highly depends on the usability of smart devices and how well they facilitate user productivity and work efficiency. In fact, user experience defines the success rate of the mobility deployment across the company as well as user adoption, which collectively drives ROI.  So, companies are paying more heed to make sure that the enterprise apps and MDM-enabled devices provide transparent, agile and easy-to-use interfaces.

Using relevant enterprise apps: Designing and deploying the right mobile applications goes a long way in ensuring employee productivity and performance. Here the major challenge is to hit a balance between security, usability, and simplicity while meeting the business goals and user benefits. IT leaders must also find a solution for other challenges of app deployment like development cost, testing, and customization, deployment issues, the rate of adoption and types of devices and operating systems. Once deployed, these enterprise apps need to be properly hosted and managed within strict IT regulations.

Applying the right mobile strategy: Leveraging the right EMM strategy can be a herculean task for enterprise leaders but it is no longer an option if you mostly have an on-field workforce. It is imperative to own a dynamic, forward-thinking and well-informed robust mobile strategy that is created keeping in mind the interests of the major stakeholders, key business objectives and IT challenges. A fool-proof mobile strategy drives company vision and is capable to answer a wide range of questions associated with factors like IT security, user experience, ease of integration, process transparency, compliance to policies and employee productivity.

3. Leverage the latest technologies to change the game for your mobile workforce

Driving a successful mobile workforce implies employing the right technologies and syncing their workflows in a way that eliminates complexity, security risks, and technical interruptions and promotes user engagement, employee performance, and cost efficiency. A well-laid mobile strategy starts with implementing a robust mobile cloud computing technology and integrating the same with flawless workflows.

Also, companies need to consistently harness futuristic and more relevant technologies that are capable to innovate, support and disrupt the dynamic environment of a mobile workforce. Technologies such as IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Analytics, Cloud Computing, and location-based techniques are transforming the face of a mobile workforce, and the rising influx of powerful SaaS products are reimagining the entire user experience driving transparency, simplicity, efficiency, and output.

While managing a mobile workforce, companies can also consider technological solutions that come in the form of a powerful Mobile Device Management, Unified Endpoint Management and Enterprise Mobility Management, which help companies secure, manage and supervise the enterprise owned devices used by the employees on-the-go to promote data and device security along with employee productivity. Leveraging these latest technologies will require the company to ensure that the benefits are provided at all levels of the company including user experience, employee performance, customer service, operations, marketing, and IT regulations.