Mobile Workforce Best Practices: Tips for Success

Using the right technology is critical for effective mobile workforce management because it provides the tools and platforms needed to track, monitor, and optimize the performance of remote workers. Technology also plays an important role in supporting best practices and resolving common challenges associated with managing remote teams.

This article will review strategies and technologies that enterprise organizations can use to support a mobile workforce and improve communication, collaboration, security, and compliance. We will also look at how smart technology, such as Tourmo AI, can help an organization support best practices and get a return on its existing technology investments.

What is Mobile Workforce Management?

The practice of managing mobile workforces, typically using advanced technology to optimize mobile operations and support workers while they work outside of traditional office space, is known as mobile workforce management. It frequently involves using technology, such as tracking, monitoring, real-time communication, scheduling, and rerouting technology.

It is important to note that mobile workforce management involves supporting mobile workers such as delivery drivers, field service technicians, sales representatives, and various other roles. Because mobile workers work in numerous settings, they will require specialized assistance and equipment to complete tasks while 'out in the field.'

What are The Challenges of Mobile Workforce Management?

When managing mobile workers, many challenges arise regarding communication, visibility, coordination, security, compliance, and more. Communication breakdowns can cause delays and errors because managers, workers, and customers are not communicating frequently or effectively. 

Coordinating and planning tasks for workers across various locations lead to inefficiencies affecting customer service and worker productivity; both have negative financial implications. Even worse, a lack of visibility into the activities of mobile workers hinders the enforcement of compliance and safety regulations. Most managers find it challenging to verify that employees abide by the rules and guidelines when they are not working from a fixed location.

Tips for Mobile Workforce Best Practices

Mobile workforce solutions are growing in popularity as more organizations take advantage of the benefits of these solutions. By equipping employees with the necessary tools and resources, they can work remotely just as effectively as they would in a traditional office setting.

Managing a mobile workforce requires a different approach than managing on-site employees, which may have a learning curve. Nevertheless, we’ve provided a few best practices and technologies to help with the transition to managing a successful mobile workforce below.

Mobile Workforce Safety and Training

Safety is an important mobile workforce best practice that should not be overlooked. Establishing a safety culture will require the support of upper-level executives, managers, and their mobile teams. Continuous training can greatly reduce safety risks and establish a good company culture (and reputation). 

Creating, communicating, and enforcing safety protocols is difficult for companies of all sizes, especially those with many employees who require regular oversight and feedback.

AI-powered solutions, such as Tourmo, support organizations in overcoming safety challenges by analyzing large volumes of data collected from sensors, GPS technology, dashcams, and mobile devices. That data helps identify potential problems and address them through automation before they lead to workplace accidents and injuries.

Tourmo also provides personalized, ongoing training and support for mobile workers. Our solutions enable supervisors to maintain complete visibility while our technology delivers automated driver feedback. Drivers are encouraged to improve their driving skills without intervention and to participate in gamification.

Connectivity and Visibility

Connectivity and visibility are essential best practices in mobile workforce management. When an enterprise needs to enforce its ability to track and monitor employees around the clock and communicate with them in real-time, dependable technologies must be available to facilitate these processes.

Companies improve their ability to monitor and manage their employees by leveraging the right technology. Solutions such as GPS and instant messaging improve communication and coordination among team members so they work more effectively from different locations. Smart technology, on the other hand, provides access to more advanced features and capabilities that enhance this effort.

AI technology automates customer service responses, monitors task completion, provides real-time communication and timing updates, and identifies inefficiencies in routes and schedules 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Tourmo AI can also monitor worker activities, behaviors, and performance, giving managers real-time insights into worker productivity and safety. Our patented software takes automatic corrective actions in real-time to resolve issues, enabling managers to reallocate their time and approach while ensuring the efficiency and safety of their mobile workforce.

Essential Equipment and Technology

Mobile workforces rely on specialized equipment and technology to carry out their duties effectively. As a result, another best practice that can help ensure success is understanding what equipment is required to provide service and support mobile workers with the tools they need to succeed.

Many mobile workers, such as delivery drivers, service technicians, and sales representatives, require GPS-enabled vehicles linked to IoT devices for real-time monitoring. Further, communication devices like smartphones and tablets enable workers to collaborate with managers and team members while accessing company information and performing other tasks like navigation, data entry, and scheduling.

Tourmo AI can process mobility data from connected vehicles and any iOS or Android smartphone or tablet to produce deep insights into mobile workforce behaviors. Our context-aware AI platform considers many factors, such as location, condition, and comparable vehicles, to create a fair and unbiased analysis.

Tourmo’s mobility platform can collect, normalize, contextualize, and manage data securely from the following devices:

• Smartphones
• Tablets
• Cameras
• OBD-II devices
• OEM vehicle systems

Integrated Systems and Automation

Many enterprise organizations are probably aware of AI's ability to monitor data from multiple systems in real-time, deriving insights and providing exceptions to managers to gain deep insights into workforce performance. These insights and systematically generated exceptions help managers identify and act on opportunities to improve overall operations.

Tourmo's patented AI technology also pushes integrated data and multiple-point solutions to new heights of performance, increasing a company's opportunity to see a return on investment.

Tourmo integrates disparate solutions and automates an organization's process structure through workflow automation. This technology automates repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as scheduling, dispatching, data entry, and analysis. Workflow automation is a valuable asset for organizations that need to free up management and key employees to focus on more value-adding tasks.

Tourmo’s AI-Powered Workforce Operations Solution

Innovative technology is critical for effective mobile workforce management, enabling enterprise organizations to support best practices, maximize performance levels, and improve employee and customer satisfaction. If your organization needs to improve its process structure, compliance, and reporting, or if you want to implement a more efficient, automated journey management process, Tourmo can help.

Tourmo's AI-powered Workforce Operations solution can track and verify mobile workforce operations around the clock, providing all managers and stakeholders with complete visibility of their mobile fleets. Tourmo will automate your entire plan, monitor worker progress, and make changes as needed, all while continuously updating your mobile workforce and consumers to ensure compliance and satisfaction. 

Our Workforce Operations solution will also track whether work is completed as planned, notify clients when something changes, and take action via automated workflows of configured exceptions or issues. These features make it easy to identify and manage issues like delays at client sites, unplanned stops, route deviations, and out-of-sequence deliveries, with features that include:

• Accurate event data, normalization, contextualization, and advanced route reasoning to remove inaccuracies
• Real-time monitoring of job progress and delivery estimates
• Real-time ETA
• Automated Progress Updates
• Activity/Inactivity Monitoring
• Systematically Generated, and Prioritized, Exceptions

Support Mobile Workforce Best Practices With Tourmo AI

The Tourmo AI-powered platform supports mobile workforce best practices by automating repetitive tasks involved in oversight and management, safety, compliance. Further, it frees management and essential workers to focus on other tasks. Our technology will also forecast future trends, allowing your company better to allocate resources, improving scheduling and workforce management decisions.

Tourmo will support your company if it is just starting its digital transformation journey or wants to improve its mobile workforce operations. Tourmo AI-powered solutions upgrade and maximize the value of your existing technology investments while improving how you track, verify, and manage operations, resulting in significant increases in efficiency and productivity.