The rise of Enterprise Mobility and how to take advantage of it

Mobility offers freedom to both employees and businesses. Especially for businesses, there are many ways to encourage this trend, without having to sacrifice the quality of work, when work overlaps with personal engagements. Here are some basic rules that any business should set, and that will be surely appreciated by your employees:

• Respect people’s personal time. Unless faced with a crisis, do not hit “Send” until your employee is fully available to respond.
• In-person communication is important. If meeting with your co-workers is a rare opportunity, you should take full advantage of it. Observe expressions, reactions and body language to get more comprehensive conclusions.
• Another important challenge, when it comes to enterprise mobility, is that of safety. It is crucial to check data and IP addresses on different and multiple mobile devices. CIOs will have to develop a policy that will embrace the mobile working culture and, at the same time, increase productivity.

A significant alternative that can help businesses mitigate the risks, is offering business-owned mobile devices to employees. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish business data from personal ones, as more and more information is stored in the cloud and synchronized with mobile devices.

A more long-term choice would be to use apps and services especially developed for businesses – and this does not just include calendars, contacts and emails. According to Gartner, soon, more than 50% of business collaborations will be conducted through relative tools, meaning that businesses will have even wider access to CRM, presentation management, HR and content management tools for ERP.

There is a direct link between the mobile experience of employees and safety. If an app is easy to use and enhances the employees’ productivity, not only they will use it but it will be less probable for them to try and discover ways to circumvent it. And, when employees rely on an app, this means that all the data they are using remain under the control of the business. So, choose an app and/or a service that is designed to meet the workflow requirements of your employees.