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Is Your Company’s Mobility Flexible Enough?

Andrew Lisa

September 11, 2014

As mobile technology becomes less expensive and more powerful, people are empowered to communicate and work on the go.

This liberation has unshackled millions of small businesses from the physical limitations of yesterday's technology. Offices that are equipped for mobile flexibility are more agile and can function with fewer resources in more environments.

As the following article notes, here are just “5 Examples of mobile office flexibility”, as well as the ingredients needed for every mobile team to function with the stability and uniformity of a traditional fixed workplace.

BYOD

The bring your own device - BYOD - revolution is changing the way businesses think about office hardware.

Although controversy exists over the concept's perceived security vulnerabilities and the IT headaches it can bring, BYOD has too many benefits to ignore.

BYOD firms allow employees to bring and work with their own familiar laptops and mobile devices, which are often as or more powerful than the business's own hardware. This means they don't have to provide things like tablets and computers, and the employees don't need to undergo training or wait to get past technological learning curves.

Telecommuting

Allowing employees to work part time - or in some cases, even full time - from home is a powerful incentive to lure and keep the best talent. It can also reduce overhead and internal expenses.

Inexpensive voice over Internet protocol - or VoIP - technology provides amazing teleconferencing abilities that can unify far-flung employees.

Telecommuting is the total embodiment of mobile office flexibility, but in order for it to be reliable enough for the demands of business, two things are required: unified communications and collaboration software.

Unified Communications

VoIP is without question the correct foundation for telecommuting and mobile office flexibility.

But talking on the phone is not simply good enough. All parties must be linked through multiple media platforms, including voice, messaging, video and screen sharing.

This concept is called unified communications - or UC. UC has been an elusive dream for businesses ever since an early voicemail company tried to link a brand-new email reader to one of its messaging machines in the early 1980s.

It remained clumsy and inefficient for decades, but UC is now an affordable reality - and a must for flexible, mobile offices.

Collaboration Software

Popular file-sharing sites like Dropbox and Podio allow multiple users to share documents, create schedules, edit shared projects and collaborate in general.

There are many cloud-based collaboration services that can unify scattered employees. They often differ only in the amount of allotted storage space.

Mobile Wifi

In order for it to work, everyone has to be plugged in.

Reliable mobile wifi is the glue that holds a mobile office together. Lose connectivity and the ship sinks. Some mobile phone carriers offer plans that include data reserved for mobile hotspot tethering, but that should just be a backup.

The reality is you'll have to invest in a mobile wifi hotspot for your employees in the field.

With mobile wifi, telecommuting, VoIP, UC and BYOD, you have more than just a whole bunch of new acronyms to remember.

You have an office that is an office no matter where across the country or the world your employees are scattered at any given minute.

Actually being inside of the same structure at the same time was a business necessity that is quickly being diminished as the world - and its workers - go mobile.

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