A mobile workforce relates to a group of employees who complete their duties outside of a traditional office environment, often visiting different locations.

Whether you manage a construction site, highways team or home call-out service, there is a range of potential problems that could impact your team’s efficiency, productivity, and safety.

We will explore the common challenges faced by your mobile workforce and how they can be solved with the correct software.

Poor Mobile Signal

From city centres to rural countryside, mobile employees can work anywhere. Unfortunately, this sometimes results in limited connectivity while they’re on-site.

Poor mobile signal can lead to communication problems and frustrated staff. Your team may need to contact you to order more materials or to report a problem; if they’re unable to do so jobs may be delayed.

While it’s unrealistic to guarantee mobile signal at every location, keeping your workforce connected wherever possible allows your employees to use their time productively and stay compliant with business procedures.

Mobile workforce management software has secure and robust synchronisation that is able to send and receive job information when the signal is intermittent, so your team can complete the job in hand.

Job Scheduling

Field workers stumble across many obstacles that can interrupt their schedule. Whether it’s traffic jams or job delays, little problems like these can cause big problems for head office! It can prove difficult to re-organise the existing workload with less staff. 

Mobile forms software makes communication easy. Employees can immediately notify you of any disruptions, allowing you to react quickly to the problem. This ensures the job stays on schedule and in turn, keeps your customers satisfied.

Unreliable Data Capture

Many businesses are yet to transition to digital processes, and paperwork can sometimes be problematic and inconvenient for mobile workers.

Paper documents are often returned incomplete or with errors, which can result in miscommunication and false information. Manual data entry also increases the risk of human error, as well as being incredibly time-consuming!

A paperless solution allows your workers to submit job descriptions, risk assessments and customer details from their location, so you have instant access to the data. The software also has features like mandatory fields to reduce on-site mistakes.

Site Safety Risks

Everyone has the right to feel safe at work, even if the job has greater levels of risk.  

Delays in receiving paper forms can mean safety problems go unrecognised and put your team in danger. To help employees feel safe on-site, mobile software can be used to submit an electronic risk assessment upon arrival. 

Gaining access to real-time risk assessments improves communication between you and your staff, and reveals potential site dangers at the earliest opportunity.

Transition to Mobile Forms Software

All these potential problems can be managed by embracing technology. We have developed Formulate, a mobile form software solution, designed to improve workflows and boost the productivity of any mobile workforce.

Contact us here for more information.