Mobilising your organisation can dramatically improve your efficiency. From lowering office overheads to improving the strength of your customer relationships, the benefits can be vast. What’s more, enabling employees to work from anywhere can also deliver a competitive advantage from a happier, more productive team.
But in order to enjoy these benefits, mobilising an organisation must be done well. This means being methodical and diligent in how you go about it, and also keeping in mind a few critical considerations, from company culture to technology.
The first of these factors is to think about just how ‘mobile’ you want your organisation to be. Should you be office-free, with staff working from home or the road, or do you just want the capability to work remotely when needed? For most, the capability to work remotely as and when required is the main motivation for mobilising, but the underlying issues to think about remain the same.
If you want to make mobilisation a success then it’s best to include your staff in the decision, or at least the transition process, as soon as possible. It may be your call to mobilise but the staff are the ones who have to work with it. Tell them that you are thinking about mobilising and listen to any concerns and requests they may have. You can then work to address these at the very beginning, making the change as pain-free and effective as you can from the outset.
Many small organisations pride themselves on their own unique culture. Ask yourself how flexible working will affect your working culture. Does your team thrive in a bustling office environment and benefit from working together closely? If so, then perhaps have a mandatory day or two each week where everyone has to work from the office. This means you can enjoy the best of both worlds.
With your team working away from a central office, effective communication is vital for efficient organisation management and co-ordination. Once you have got your communications technology – such as Microsoft Lync – in place, you need to make sure they are being used. Scheduling regular calls with your team means you can keep up to date with the latest developments across the organisation, as you would in the office.
If you want your mobile organisation to be effective, then ultimately you need to visibly lead by example. Schedule calls, listen to your staff, share frequent updates with the team and be in regular contact. Mobilising your organisation requires hard work and dedication. To ensure it is effective, make sure you are showing everyone else how it’s done.
This is what makes the difference in a successful mobile organisation. Your staff need to have access to the information they require at all times, from anywhere, and this applies to all areas of the organisation, from emails to invoicing, sales data to telephony. To help with this, you need to look to the liberating benefits of the cloud.
Cloud-based services, such as Vantage Hosted Exchange Emails or Office 365, not only enable access to information and functionality from anywhere with an internet connection, they also save on investment in hardware. Win-win.
Security, updates and managing new devices is not something that every small organisation can manage in-house. We can take care of this with our Complete IT Solution support service, so you can concentrate on your own organisation.
If you have decided that your company can benefit from mobilisation, please contact us today and we will happily implement any of the above.