5 capabilities you need to manage a mobile workforce

The world has gone mobile

Times have certainly changed in recent years—led not only by a global pandemic but a new generation of workers seeking flexibility, purpose, and a positive culture in their jobs above all else. 

Employers have responded, overturning decades of traditional practices to provide the flexibility and mobility needed to attract high performers in a competitive market. 

With a flexible and mobile workforce becoming the new normal, employers now need to take an earnest look at their business systems and ask: do we have the tools to achieve total visibility and governance of our people who are working anytime, anywhere, and on a multitude of devices?

Managing a mobile workforce requires purpose-built solutions

Many traditional practices no longer work in a modern business landscape—and this extends to traditional workforce management tools. 

Effectively managing a mobile workforce requires purpose-built solutions that leverage the latest technologies to address the specific needs and challenges of overseeing people who are always on the go.  

Skedulo is leading the way in this field, with a complete mobile workforce management solution that has been recognized globally for its capability and flexibility in meeting the needs of businesses that manage any number of mobile workers. 

Let’s look at 5 specific capabilities that are essential to effective mobile workforce management, and how implementing them can have a positive ripple effect in all areas of your business—from operations to IT, employees, customers, finance, and more.

1. Smart scheduling with 100% workforce visibility

How do you gain oversight of a mobile workforce using tools like spreadsheets and emails? 

The truth is, it’s virtually impossible. You cannot see the swim length of your resources, availability, and customer demand without an interface that draws all of this data together and serves it up to you at the click of a button. 

This includes key characteristics of your workforce that you may not think require visibility, but make life and workforce management much easier when they are. These could include things like worker certifications, flagging of certification expiry dates, and travel data. 

Here are 10 features that we have purposefully built into Skedulo to ensure our customers are equipped with smart scheduling and 100% workforce visibility:

• Drag + drop scheduling with calendars, maps, swim lanes and Gantt charts
• Shift scheduling for fixed locations and mobile work
• Real time locations and job statuses of your workforce
• Pipeline of pending, assigned and dispatched jobs
• Ability to manage single jobs, recurring work and irregular patterns 
• Automated job and worker pairing recommendations based on skills, qualifications and location
• Suggested route and navigation to reduce travel time
• Automatic job scheduling using intelligent automation
• Certification management and expiry date flagging
• Data insights on productivity, time in the field, travel, and more

2. Centralized, real time communication

How do you keep track of communications and save on re-work when your mobile workforce uses emails, text messages and calls to share information? 

While messaging channels can be a great way to engage teams, communications are still completely separate from job records. If you’re managing hundreds of jobs and mobile workers, this quickly adds up to a high level of inefficiency and knowledge loss that costs the business money. 

As a complete mobile workforce management solution, Skedulo has invested in making real time communication easy—with the ability to keep all communications centralized to drive knowledge sharing and retention, and enable a better worker and customer experience. 

Here are 8 communication features that Skedulo offers as standard:

• Intuitive mobile app
• Instant messaging between mobile and desk-based workers
• SMS and push notifications for real time updates 
• Group conversations by team, channel or topic 
• All job details attached to the job record
• Images taken on the phone can be attached to the job record
• Ability to make job notes for future reference
• Digital forms for worker or customer sign off

3. Self-service for workers and customers

Self-service empowers people to say what they need, when they need it—and saves desk-based workers from having to field calls and handle the variety of requests that go hand in hand with managing a mobile workforce.

By integrating a self-service calendar into your website and pre-configuring worker availability, you empower customers to book appointments at times that suit them. When this is followed by automatic appointment reminders, you decrease the potential for no-shows which saves time and money. 

Self-service is also valuable from an employee standpoint if they are empowered to accept jobs that align with their availability, or submit digital requests for time off and so on.  

Here are 8 features of Skedulo that ensure our customers are equipped with the best in self-service:

• Scheduling calendar which can be integrated into your website
• Ability to pre-set availability for appointments
• Self-service scheduling and rescheduling for customers
• Choose from in-person and virtual meetings
• Automatic virtual meeting setup with links emailed to attendees
• Automated appointment reminders
• Digital forms for leave requests and more
• New job notifications so workers can accept on a “first come, first served” basis

4. Five-star security measures for mobile workers

IT teams have been under severe pressure in recent years—first in keeping pace with rising cybersecurity threats, and second in having to boost enterprise security to cater to remote working in light of COVID. 

Managing the security of a mobile workforce is no easy feat. It requires special precautions that account for the unique ways people access information in the field, and the wide range of threats associated with doing this while on the move. 

Our engineers have spent over a decade equipping Skedulo with the world’s best security features to give our customers peace of mind that their data—whether static or in flight—is fully protected 100% of the time. 

Here are 10 security features of Skedulo that you would never want your mobile workforce management solution to be without:

• Datacenter security through Amazon Web Services 
• Secure By Design principle
• Robust encryption in flight and at-rest
• Continuous network monitoring
• Network segmentation through Virtual Private Cloud
• Nightly vulnerability scans
• Periodic third-party penetration tests
• Customer data backups stored in separate regions
• Role based access control
• Comprehensive, integrated Information Security Management System (ISO 27001 compliant)

5. Configuration and integration

One of the main issues with aging proprietary systems is their inability to integrate with other systems. 

In this new era of digital transformation, companies are increasingly choosing to deploy best of breed solutions that are designed to solve specific business challenges. When these solutions then work together seamlessly in the background, businesses reap the benefits of having the most advanced technology working together as one perfectly integrated system. 

This is something we are proud to offer at Skedulo—having forged strong relationships with leading brands across the full suite of business needs, from customer service to sales management, human resources, finances, and more. 

We’ve also gone to great lengths to make sure Skedulo has the flexibility to meet unique business needs. This is why the platform can be configured to address specific business challenges, and serve up a truly intuitive experience that your mobile workers and customers will love. 

The time to deploy is now

80% of the world’s workforce is now deskless, and this figure continues to climb. 

As your business adapts to meet the needs of today’s workers and consumers, there’s no better time to implement a mobile workforce management solution that delivers significant benefits such as:

• better communication
• higher productivity
• more customer engagement
• improved brand loyalty
• less unnecessary expenditure
• more agility
• greater data insights

If you’re concerned that deploying a new solution will be a huge, expensive and cumbersome task, don’t be. We’ve got that covered.

Implement Skedulo in less than 3 months