A mobile workforce is more than just remote workers
When a colleague of mine first mentioned having what he called a true mobile workforce, I did not fully understand what a mobile workforce was. In my eyes, I saw a mobile workforce as a portion of employees who were primarily outbound, such as service technicians and remote sales representatives who worked from their homes. Since those positions do not exist at my company, I did not put much thought into the concept of a mobile workforce. A few weeks later, I mentioned that with illness, raising children and all the unexpected things that pop up in their lives, that it would be nice if my employees had the option to perform some of their duties from outside the office. It was then I was told about all the elements that could be put into place to give that level of access from outside the office and I realized that is what a mobile workforce is: A mobile workforce are staff members who can access work resources from outside the workplace. I took the first step and discussed mobile workforce requirements from a technological standpoint with my IT contractor. The first step advised was to create an internet based portal that would, among other benefits, offer email access to employees from any computer in the world. In fact, I may even consider outsourcing my email service to an in the cloud service as opposed to keeping it on internal servers. In cloud services are inherently accessible from anywhere and would allow quicker setup of mobile workforce resources than if I were to try to develop internally. Enabling a mobile workforce is on ongoing project; it will take time, but my company will eventually get there. I feel it is in my own best interest to give my staff every resource at my disposal in order to help them get their jobs done.