Work Goes Mobile: Nokia’s Lessons from the Leading Edge

Work Goes Mobile talks about Nokia’s own corporate experience — benefits and pitfalls — of adding mobility to its business processes. Among the benefits you’d naturally expect to hear about lurk some intriguing statistics. For example: the typical desk at Nokia is occupied less than 50 percent of the time, while the company’s conference rooms are constantly overbooked and people shift their hours to collaborate with co-workers in other time zones or work from home via broadband. You can see why the company would be a candidate for FlexiSpace — Nokia’s name for hot-desking.

Much of the pressure for increased mobility comes from employees. They want to work at home. They have mobile devices they’ve become used to using and want to integrate them more tightly into their working lives. Or they want to shift some of their hours in order to work effectively with colleagues in other time zones or to better balance work and family. These trends, say authors Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, actually predated Nokia’s official efforts to mobilise its workforce.

But for all sorts of reasons, businesses can’t accommodate these trends without planning and thought. Letting workers bring in their own devices creates problems with security, data backup and technical support. Managers have to learn different methods of assessing performance when their employees are away from the office much of the time. As workers disperse, they become isolated and communication breaks down even within teams that have worked well together in the past. Businesses need to find virtual replacements for the office water cooler, create ways to keep their workers productive and motivated, respect privacy and promote teamwork. Some will resist the changes, and they will help.

source: zdnet.co.uk