Mobile Learning - Need to find an extra 196 working hours a year? Mobilise!

More effective working hours and greater team efficiency are both factors pushing more employers towards mobilising their workforce. Mobile phones, 'smartphones', PDAs, Blackberries and other devices are all changing the way in which we work and, inevitably, the ways in which we communicate and learn.

A study by Ipsos Reid found that Blackberry users produce an extra 56 minutes of effective work a day, that work teams with mobile communications found themselves to be 29% more effective, and that, shockingly, the same teams processed just less than 3,000 emails and more than 1400 calls per year, per person.

Firstly, this means that organisations must be aware of the nature and working patterns of the mobilised workforce in order to maximise the clear operational advantages. In an example with a negative impact, one organisation amended a daily report with over 50 line items into individual emails. The resulting individual communications produced a timely, but ultimately fractured, picture of what was going on ‘back at the office’. On a more positive note, synching a disparate team’s ongoing appointments centrally meant one organisation could double the number of intra-team communications – everyone was able to know what everyone was doing and thus informally converse and support each other.

Secondly, organisations need to effectively mobilise their messages and materials to better enable their staff. However, let’s take a moment and make sure no-one is seeing mobile as a ‘simple step’. Screen size and usability of data are just two of the many considerations with regard to mobile devices. Some ground rules can help you avoid simplistic assumptions:

1. Don’t assume technical uniformity. Higher management tiers of the organisation may well have different devices than other areas and just because a ‘fleet’ of devices all look the same, they may not be the same.
   
2. Stick to your goals. Don’t start changing your tactics simply because mobilisation has promise.
   
3. You can’t precis everything. Can you get complex, sensitive information like a company report into an SMS message? Clearly not, so why try?
   
4. Don’t forget audio. Our new, amazing mobile devices may be able to play golf games, take camera quality photos and video conference, but they can also allow people to listen to local or remote audio sources. Audio is a very powerful form of communication.

Finally, let’s take a moment to consider the human factor. It’s great that people have their Blackberry so they can stay in touch, but do they have time to think do they have time to create effective work, and do they have quality time with their clients, family and friends? Just because we live in an ‘always connected’ environment doesn’t mean that humans are necessarily effective when they are always expected to be available. Encouraging a ‘twitch culture’ where everyone responds to everything immediately, way into the evening, is no fun and your workforce should feel you encourage a culture that knows there’s an ‘off’ button on mobile devices too.

Dominic Mason, Consultant