A frustrating press release from Nokia arrives on my desk this morning. They've done a 'state of the workforce' report and offered a link to it, which isn't actually updated to include the details yet. So although the blurb tells me there's disparity between the managers' perceptions of mobility and those of the people on the ground, I don't yet know who has the higher opinion.
Research on mobile working is nothing new of course. There's a swatch of white papers and reports on the Bitpipe site, and Forbes has collected many reports you can read at your leisure.
Most of these reports, though, dwell on the technical - what can be achieved rather than what actually happens. Talking to a lot of people who have workers 'on the road', particularly in the small business area, I find the issue isn't the technology - there are enough mobile phones and smartphones plus WiFi hotspots around to make taking most of your office applications on the road a cinch. The issues people face are those of trusting a workforce you can't actually see, and learning to manage by results rather than by face time or 'presentee-ism'.
These and security concerns are what's holding people back. That and the nagging feeling that if a business is actually working satisfactorily there's probably no need to spend lots of money on making everyone terribly mobile or available wherever they are. And there's the issue of keeping people motivated - a couple of years ago I went to a BT event on mobile working and they confirmed that a per centage of people they'd empowered by allowing them to work from home had decided that they'd rather be empowered to come back into the office and see people, thanks.
There will always be people who need to work at different locations - sales reps can't work exclusively from the office, health workers have a tendency to need to see their patients and actors are more useful performing with their colleagues than phoning their parts in. Usually. But is mobile and flexible working just another buzzword - and is it translating into reality for as many companies as the hypesters would have us believe?
