Mobile working has never been more important – is your company ready?

The ability to work from home, or work remotely, has been brought sharply into focus by the outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Most firms across the UK have been forced to shut their offices and instruct their workforce to operate from home following a government lockdown put in place to reduce the spread of the virus. So, how are you and your workforce coping with the requirement to work remotely?

The answer to that question lies in the quality of your technology infrastructure. Equipping everyone with laptops and smartphones is merely a start. How does your back-end technology function? Perhaps alarmingly give the situation in which we find ourselves, in a recent survey we conducted with Surveys in Public Sector, we found that 57% of organisations are still relying heavily on paper-based and spreadsheet methods of managing their workforce.

The pitfalls of such reliance are obvious and will become glaringly so to the 57% of organisations in that bracket during the onset of COVID-19. Not only are such methods time consuming, they often result in a lack of integration across a business, with no single source of truth. There is then the problem of Chinese whispers occurring, with misinformation, inconsistent data keying and a lack of efficiency across the entire process. With all the moving parts based in different locations, this will prove incredibly difficult to manage for some firms.

We also see in the report that organisations are already struggling to plan and manage their mobile workforce without the addition of a global pandemic, with 76% saying that they find the task difficult. Again, this is a scenario that will be exasperated by forcing even more of the workforce into a mobile situation. If it’s difficult to manage tasks during periods of normality, the stress scenario posed by COVID-19 will multiply this.

This seems to be something that most organisations are aware of, too. Responding to the question; What to do you believe are the biggest benefits when digitising resource management for your organisation?  68% replied, increasing flexibility and scalability of resources, whilst 67% replied, enable more efficient mobile or remote working.

What this shows us is that organisations have been aware of the need for change. That change isn’t just about technology, either, but about working culture, too. This has been slowly happening with advancements in technology, with laptops, smartphones and broadband making it possible to be connected 24/7.

Now that we find ourselves in the unusual position that COVID-19 has thrown up, aligning available technology with a short to medium-term culture shift is the key to business continuity.

Since flexibility sits at the heart of the process, workforce management software is designed to be just that, which means it isn’t too late to implement new software in your organisation. It has never been more important to rely on a mobile workforce and to effectively and efficiently manage them. Are you ready?

For our full report, The Future of Mobile Working in the Public Sector, please visit: https://pages.caci.co.uk/future-mobile-working.html