In 2023, one of the defining buzzwords in business has been workplace mobility. Developing out of remote working, which itself saw a dramatic increase from 2020 onwards, it’s rapidly becoming more and more accepted as a model for employee management.
New models of working have been gaining in traction in recent years as the old system of 9-5 with a long commute is less and less appealing to employees. Younger generations especially do not want to be spending hours going to and coming from work every day.
Lifestyle changes also mean that there is less of an obsession with work, with fewer people seeing it as a high priority in their life. Combine that with a growing comfortability with remote working, and it’s easy to see why more and more companies are looking at remote work with eager eyes.
It also allows companies to consider international recruitment, rather than simply limiting themselves to the home market. Workplace mobility allows companies to not only consider allowing employees to move freely, but also allows the employer to be flexible in their choice of worker.
What is workplace mobility?
Basically put, it is the endpoint of remote working. Rather than just passing work to be done from home, it instead allows employees to be able to work at any time on any device. Rather than a home office, there is simply no defined office.
In theory, this means you have the opportunity to implement full workplace mobility across the organisation. This means having no central office and strongly encouraging your employees to be agile in their places of work.
However, in practice it is much more common to see hybrid models where there may be a smaller central office. Some employees may enjoy total mobility, whereas others may be restricted to certain events or moments. It may be the case that team members have the option to be mobile, but rarely use it, instead simply working from home on the same device.
It rewards employees who are capable of working independently and taking their own decisions. They must also be focused enough to get the tasks done in a reasonable timeframe. Management, by the same token, must be comfortable with hands-off management where they allow a great deal of worker autonomy.
It doesn’t suit some types of business, such as industries who need a fixed production plant or physical point of sale. It also isn’t always a good fit for workers who are tied to a certain point or who enjoy going into an office.
The benefits of workplace mobility
The main benefit of workplace mobility is that is simply makes your employees happier. They tend to feel less stressed and be more productive when they have the flexibility to continue doing their work from a variety of locations.
Retaining and attracting talent is much easier for those companies that can offer workplace mobility, as a growing number of especially younger workers highly value flexibility. Generation Z, especially, sees the work-life balance as something to manage carefully.
Being able to work across borders becomes possible with workplace mobility, as there is no need to worry about a single fixed point such as a head office. This means that your employees can travel if necessary and continue working with little or no interruption to their tasks.
Also, hiring abroad becomes easier, as you do not have to limit yourself to the home market. Many countries now have swathes of highly trained graduates coming out of their university systems and cannot always accommodate all of them within the local economy.
The more flexible you can be as an employer here, the more potential reward you can find. There is a very strong case to be made for investing in emerging markets as a source of well-trained labour, especially in fields such as engineering and programming.
You may well make savings costs here, too, as these employees may well be more competitively priced than local workers are. Even if not, you certainly won’t be paying out for relocation services or wasting time on visa applications and so on.
Opportunities for asynchronous working also open up if you have employees in different time zones. This mode of working allows you to offer more hours for service if you are a client-facing company, or permits your workers to work in staggered shifts that can make tasks faster.
Challenges of workplace mobility
Workplace mobility naturally involves a strong reliance on software. If there is a worldwide or regional difficulty with one of the platforms you are using, you will find communication problems across the entire team. This can be mitigated easily enough by making sure you have backup systems ready for cases like this.
Hardware too, can fail, so you need to make sure that your team is fully up-to-date with the devices they are using to get their job done. You should also provide the hardware yourself, at least as an option, so that employees are not distracted by using their home devices.
This all leads to certain degree of extra cost, such as paying for premium subscriptions to virtual services, paying for backups and of course replacing or providing hardware. There is not much you can do about this, but remember that you are likely to be saving money elsewhere.
You may find that some members of your team become alienated from others, as they may miss the camaraderie of face-to-face contact in an office. The relationship between remote work and mental health is something that you need to pay careful attention to and offer support where necessary.
