Best practice: Making life easier for business travellers

These days almost every organisation includes some mobile workers. Stewart Baines offers advice on what the IT department can do to make them more productive.

It is hard enough booking flights, organising taxis and arriving at a crucial meeting without being considerably flustered. But when the challenge of connecting to vital customer records while in a taxi is introduced, it can be enough to make the business traveller chuck it all in for a life in the country tending goats.

Mobile working is a great idea but in practice it is still a 'seat of the pants' experience, with intermittent periods of tedium and frustration.

But does it need to be that way? The IT department can play a critical role in ensuring mobile workers stay productive and enjoy the upside of being a road warrior. By making it easy to connect to and use corporate systems from afar, the IT director can do their bit to reduce churn, drive sales growth and improve employee productivity.

In this guide to mobile workforce best practice, we offer some handy hints in managing mile-munchers.

Recognise everyone is different
Different jobs, different needs. Recognise that sales may need different devices, access methods and privileges compared to a field engineer or a marketing executive. Carry out an audit to find out which jobs are most suited to mobile working and prioritise these on the rollout.

Next, ensure they have the tools to do their job appropriately: a Microsoft-powered PDA is no substitute for a laptop when presentations are a key activity. Ensure departmental managers support rather than hinder mobile working. Too many think it's a threat to their control.

Lock it down
Security is the biggest concern for managing mobile staff. The old adage that the more you increase security, the more unusable a system becomes is true to a point. And while we don't want to make remote access a chore, a pragmatic view of authentication and authorisation can ensure that data be made secure without making life extremely uncomfortable for the user. Where possible, use two-factor authentication with digital signatures or tokens.

IT directors must also protect the data on corporate mobile devices by enforcing PIN codes and passwords. Workers invariably carry sensitive information such as emails and instant messages stored on their laptops, PDAs and mobile phones so make sure they safeguard this via encryption, passwords or PIN codes.

Tie a knot in it
Lost and stolen laptops, PDAs and smart phones cost your company more than the price of replacing the hardware. They also represent the most common form of breaching confidential information.

The first step is to remind employees not to leave their devices behind - trains, tubes and buses tend to be the most common places, followed by restaurants and pubs. The next is to ensure that any confidential data is encrypted. It is a very simple step to take and ensures that confidential information does not fall into the wrong hands.

Access all areas
With the proliferation of multimode diallers, access problems should be consigned to history. Fast fixed and wireless networks are almost pervasive in Europe and the US, and diallers such as Orange's Business Everywhere, Fiberlink and iPass are just three of those available that can authenticate over a number of networks, tunnelling through to a company network or onto the internet. Billing is then consolidated and sent to the enterprise, rather than using credit cards or scratch vouchers.

Multimode diallers are ideally combined with a PC card featuring GSM, GPRS, 3G and wi-fi. If you have at least half a dozen regular business travellers that could benefit from being connected on the move, there really is no excuse for not using a multimode, multifunction dialler.

Be paranoid
Using a dialler will cut down the number of passwords necessary to access the corporate network but mobile workers will still have several passwords and PINs to remember.

Make sure staff are educated and briefed on sensible use of passwords and PIN numbers so they don't write passwords down on post-it notes stuck to their laptops, for example, or don't use the same password for all devices.

Control devices
Workers will always use devices such as USB drives, MP3 players, digital cameras and PDAs - and many will try to connect these devices, most of which are unauthorised by the IT department, to a work laptop or desktop system at some point. And it's not just the rank and file - senior executives are the ones most likely to have a non-standard mobile phone or PDA.

What do you do? Firstly, authorise as many as possible. Provide every employee with a sanctioned mobile device and then make sure they use it. Secondly, place a fence between non-corporate devices that you will accept such as workers' home PCs and those that you won't such as USB drives or MP3 players.

The danger here is not just placing bad data or viruses on the corporate network but also removing sensitive data by downloading it to a USB drive and carrying it out of the office. If this happens, punish the employee in accordance with corporate policy.

Push don't pull
Remote logon to email servers with GPRS can be quite slow. It's not just the time it takes to download messages - authentication seems to take an eon when using mobile networks.

The push version of mobile email, as offered by the BlackBerry and other similar devices, can be labour saving for mobile employees who need email on the move. Pull, where the user has to initiate the session, can take a minute or more to log on and receive. This is long enough to put many people off doing it when dashing between buses, train and planes. Where 'downtime' is fragmented, to improve productivity you need to make email so simple it's already there. Just don't let staff do it while driving.

Don't ask how much
Managing and monitoring mobile workers has its place. But it's probably better to assume that the justification for mobile working is because employees want the freedom it offers, and that those already on the road can be made more effective.

If you are trying to measure the productivity gains by a mobile worker who used to be office-based, please be careful. How can you measure the productivity of a knowledge worker, for instance, when it's hard to put a value on the knowledge generated? Is it billable hours, articles written or customers dealt with? Building a quantitative model to justify teleworking, remote working, mobile working and any other working that does not involve being in the office should be avoided. You may well undermine productivity by trying to measure it.

Make them feel wanted
There can be many advantages to being a mobile worker such as travel, autonomy and variety. But there are many drawbacks too. Many road warriors feel underappreciated, alienated and mistrusted by their colleagues, even though they may work harder than those based in an office. Many mobile workers believe their colleagues think they're not pulling their own weight. So make sure the message gets through that each employee is valued and important - no matter where they conduct business.

Be chatty
One way to make workers feel wanted and involved when they're away from their desks is collaboration tools, which bring together on-the-road and office-bound employees via videoconferencing, chat and digital whiteboards.

An extension of this is instant messaging deployed on mobile devices. This can be a simple way of encouraging mobile workers to communicate more regularly with colleagues so that they don't feel so isolated and office staff are not suspicious when emails go unanswered for more than a few minutes. IM can also be incorporated in productivity tools or collaboration software which brings people together in virtual groups.

Rescue deskless workers
The zeal with which some companies have approached hot-desking - the practice of providing fewer desks than there are employees - has left many mobile workers without a desk. Of course, when England play in the World Cup or immediately before a bank holiday, the office may be awash with free desks but at other times, the risk of not getting a desk makes the mobile worker become a homeworker for a day.

To ensure that further alienation does not ensue, provide a web-based system for booking desk space, making sure it is not abused by employees booking desks they have no intention of using.

In conclusion, to make the life of a mobile worker a happy one, give them a device that's fit for their job, or let them use their own if they really must. Ensure security is tight but not asphyxiating, and that simple tasks such as answering email really are simple and not dozens of clicks followed by minutes of waiting.

Recommend the use of mobile and desktop IM so teams can be in regular communication, and when business travellers want to come into the office, make sure there is somewhere for them to sit. Then all you need to do is give them a big hug to make them feel wanted.