Mobile employees use any means to stay productive

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 Stephani Lewis, Marketing

Mobile employees were initially considered as employees at remote locations, telecommuting from a home office or a shared office space, or traveling, usually working from hotels, cafes, and airports.

Mobile employees are no longer working at a fixed remote point, but are more often mobile while they work, using smartphones, iPads and tablets.

Growing numbers of knowledge workers, 80%, will work one or two days from their office at home, as we found in May’s Mobile Workforce Report. However, there’s another segment of mobile employee — those that don’t have a planned telecommute schedule but will find themselves in situations requiring remote access – access on the weekends or evenings, waiting for an appointment, during child pick-up or activities, or waiting for a meeting at another location.

In these instances, IT needs to consider additional use cases and technology for these occasional mobile workers to increase the mobile workforce productivity. This will become a more common scenario as the mobile workforce continues to grow and expects to be able to get online whenever necessary, with the tools that they prefer.

For example, I experienced an emergency, requiring remote work and access to all corporate systems. During a four day span (including the weekend), I used a variety of devices and online applications. My connections included:

• Home Wi-Fi, using my company laptop for email and other work, with iPass OpenMobile providing secure access to our internal systems
• Home Wi-Fi for my personal laptop
• At home with my company laptop, using an iPass-issued 3G card to do streaming video, with chat, to participate in a company meeting
• Smartphone email access and texting while standing in line or walking
• Phone calls
• Restaurant free Wi-Fi access for my laptop, using OpenAccess
• Coffee shop “pay” Wi-Fi that was part of the iPass network
• Laptop with 3G card while sitting in the parking lot, waiting for a scheduled appointment and no free Wi-Fi

As a mobile worker, I found myself very productive because I had connectivity and data access when needed. I was able to keep my projects moving and stayed in constant contact with team members. Because I use the iPass services, I was able log in seamlessly, consistently and safely, getting directly to our corporate systems. For every connection, I suspect that IT could breathe easy because their automatic controls and policies made sure to run the anti-virus protection each time I logged in. But all that mattered to me was that I was online.

I’m sure that everyone has an experience like this. Let me know yours!

Tags: mobile workforce