What is a Mobile Workforce?

Employees who work outside a centralized office for extended periods, if not their entire day, are referred to as mobile workers. These employees require specialized support as they conduct business outside physical office space. Mobile workers can include linemen, field service technicians, installers and field laborers. 

Mobile workers, who are frequently dispersed across multiple cities and states, if not nationally or globally, require the assistance of advanced technological solutions. These solutions should provide secure connectivity, facilitate real-time communication between the company and its mobile workforce, and accelerate the exchange of information needed to complete and manage work-related tasks.

The Challenges of a Mobile Workforce

Businesses will face several complex challenges when managing a mobile workforce over period of time. Outside of requesting greater access to more renewable forms of energy, customers have come to expect more visibility and insights into the companies they receive service from—and power utilities are no exception. Companies like Amazon and Uber have made customers expect that they should always be able to track products and services from companies in real time. They even reporting worldwide delivery delays that are expected to continue into 2023. These shipping delays will likely impact the holiday season and lower customer satisfaction ratings, potentially leading customers to shop elsewhere.

Companies that manage mobile workforces across several industries have similar concerns connected to customer and employee satisfaction, workforce productivity, visibility, safety, and more. We’ll highlight and discuss the top challenges of a mobile workforce below. 

Visibility

Maintaining visibility and appropriate reporting across a mobile workforce continues to be a significant challenge for many businesses. While many companies choose to work with advanced technological solutions such as Greenstar Digiworx, other businesses attempt to manage their mobile workforce through manual processes and instinct, leading to higher rates of human error, downtime, and increased costs.

Amazon and Uber are changing the way businesses interact with their customers and raising the bar for providing high-quality customer experiences across all industries. In today’s fast-changing market conditions, power utility companies that manage their mobile workforces must be swift, efficient, and flexible when making everyday decisions.

For utilities that manage mobile workforces, recent market disruptive and transformative trends emphasize the importance of effective mobile workforce management and the application of appropriate technological solutions.

The challenges of a mobile workforce include managing and overseeing multiple daily tasks to ensure employees can perform well and access critical business information remotely.

Productivity

Monitoring productivity is one of the most frequently reported concerns of companies managing a mobile workforce. Contrary to popular belief, mobile workforces are said to be more productive than employees who work in a physical office. However, challenges remain in monitoring and managing their day-to-day tasks to ensure the highest levels of productivity and efficiency.

Companies with mobile workforces are constantly under pressure to do more with less. When time and resources are limited, they can find themselves in situations requiring increased levels of management oversight and directive and cannot provide it. Furthermore, as service scenarios become more complex, managers and other stakeholders may find themselves powerless when something unexpected impacts their business (e.g., Hurricanes and heavy snow falls).

These circumstances will necessitate using advanced technology solutions, such as Digiworx, that can help boost productivity, monitor whether work is being completed as planned, streamline service delivery, and assist businesses in making necessary adjustments automatically.

Customer and Employee Satisfaction

Businesses that manage mobile workforces frequently face daily challenges related to providing on-time service, keeping customers satisfied with the service provided, and improving the customer and employee experience. In today's fast-changing economic climate, businesses must be swift and flexible when making decisions as their mobile workforce generates revenue.

Employees who lack access to critical business information necessary to perform their daily tasks, lack connectivity and communication with managers and other employees, and use outdated technologies are more likely to report lower levels of satisfaction with their jobs. 

Companies that rely on Digital Workforce Management Platform such as Digiworx and Telematics technologies such as Fleetview to improve customer and employee satisfaction rates may struggle to manage large amounts of data generated by these systems, resulting in information overload and an inability to make the fast decisions necessary to ensure company assets and employees operate at peak efficiency. 

Sustainability

Power utilities that support mobile workforces will have to learn new methods of being more effective and efficient. This is expected to happen in the coming years as more businesses adopt to hybrid and mobile working environments. As these changes occur, there will be greater emphasis on sustainability initiatives to reduce CO2 levels and waste to protect the environment.

Sustainability initiatives will include finding ways to conserve fuel, improve fuel efficiency, reduce CO2 emissions, digitize paper documents, workforce performance management and more. Power utilities can select from several sustainable workorder and fleet planning strategies. Working with Greenstar advanced, AI-powered Digital Workforce Management Platform (Digiworx and Fleetview) capable of monitoring and reporting on your carbon footprint can help support the effectiveness of those efforts.

Safety 

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's estimate of traffic fatalities, traffic deaths in the United States reached high in 2021. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its preliminary estimate of 2021 traffic fatalities. According to the NHTSA, 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic accidents in 2021, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. Fatalities involving at least one large truck (trucks weighing more than 10,000 pounds) were up 13% over 2020. 

It is critical that fleet enterprises adopt a company culture that promotes safe driving habits. Greenstar’s advanced Fleetview solution empower drivers to take control of their driving behavior and achieve higher performance levels immediately.

Greenstar’s SurgeCloud platform allows supervisors to maintain complete visibility while our technology provides automated driver feedback. Drivers are encouraged to improve their driving skills without the intervention of a supervisor and to participate in gamification. When Fleetview detects a pattern of unsafe driving behavior, it will request supervisor coaching.

Digital Workforce Management Solution

AI-powered Digital Workforce Management solution can monitor and verify workforce operations while providing total visibility to all managers and stakeholders. Digiworx allows you to automate your plan, monitor worker progress, and make necessary changes while continuously updating your mobile workforce and consumers to ensure compliance and satisfaction.

Managers and power utility stakeholders can use AI to reduce their reliance on manual tasks and manual data analysis. Greenstar’s AI technology can transform massive amounts of data into actionable processes that can drive daily decisions and raise awareness in critical areas of the power utility's operations.

Our AI-powered Digital Workforce Management solution can track whether work is completed as planned, notify clients when something changes, and take action via automated workflows. Greenstar’s SurgeCloud platform makes it easy to identify and manage issues like delays at client sites, unplanned stops, route deviations, and out-of-sequence deliveries, with features that include:

• Service Visit Monitoring & Verification
• Automated Progress Updates
• Real-Time ETA
• Activity/Inactivity Monitoring

AI — Overcome the Challenges of a Mobile Workforce

The challenges of a mobile workforce are extended to all industries that manage employees in remote locations. Whether a company manages an in-home caregiver workforce, delivery drivers, or field service technicians, advanced mobile workforce technology will play a critical role in improving how these companies manage, derive insights, identify exceptions, make improvements, and overcome significant challenges in the future.

Greenstar can help you take your existing mobile workforce solutions to the next level. Our technology is more than just a tracking and monitoring solution. Our AI-powered workflows will allow you to scale workforce training and management, benefit from predictive analytics, and respond to rapidly changing conditions.

Workforce Operations workflows make efficiency possible.

• Automated Workforce Operations Workflows
• Better engagement: Up to 25% increase in workforce utilization.
• More reliability: Up to 10% reduction in unnecessary trips.
• Higher satisfaction: Up to 15% increase in customer satisfaction.
• Lower cost: Up to 40% reduction in manual overhead.
• Increased employee engagement, reliability, and satisfaction
• Future-proof through configurability

Our automated Workforce Operations workflows give you total visibility. Automate your plan, know whether you’re on schedule, and automatically make adjustments as needed. Keep your team and customers constantly updated to ensure compliance and satisfaction

Functional Deliverables of Digiworx

Capture & Analyze Useful Data: Ensure the effective and secure collection, storage, analysis and distribution of comprehensive data from the field.

Enhance Customer Engagement: Capture real-time feedback, reduce response times, and deliver solutions promptly to increase customer satisfaction.

Empower Field Teams: Improve employee satisfaction and productivity by providing a digital solution that is simple to use and understand.

Improve Productivity: Optimize workflows by tracking field productivity, performance and compliance and integrating the collected data into internal business applications.

Reduce Costs: Make effective business decisions using data analytics and reporting to reduce cycle times and costs.

Minimize Errors: Enhance business intelligence and reduce reporting errors by making use of highly accurate data analysis tools.

Features of Digiworx

• Various Field Types: Digiworx allows users to choose from over 30 field types to build a highly customized digital form that caters to wide range of business needs.
• Photos, Videos & Audio: Digiworx supports native device features to capture a variety of information including images, audio and video files, and more.
• Maps & Timestamps: Digiworx uses timestamps and geotagging to identify the location and time of a submission.
• Support Resources: Digiworx provides users with access to support resources, such as diagrams, documents, and training videos, which can be easily updated or changed.
• Advanced Data Analytics: Digiworx enhances business intelligence by tracking productivity, improving quality control, monitoring compliance levels and understanding user behaviors presented through intuitive real-time dashboards.
• Live Support & Chat: Digiworx contains a built-in ticketing system which allows users to voice their concerns and chat with support staff in real-time to resolve any issues promptly.
• Report SLA and Escalation: Digiworx allows organizations to track the level of service being provided by defining rules and metrics, and report any challenges or concerns that require escalation.
• Workflow Integration: Digiworx allows organizations to integrate business processes as the data collected can be used to digitize end-to-end business processes.
• Notifications: Digiworx ensures that organizations are immediately alerted to any concerns or challenges that may occur through the use of push notifications.
• Security: Digiworx incorporates security measures which ensure the protection of data by requesting user authentication and restricting access for certain groups.