The use of mobile devices in the workplace is becoming increasingly common. Employees appreciate the flexibility and convenience mobility offers; employers enjoy increased accessibility to workers. A growing list of studies show business leaders believe mobile adoption is driving higher levels of employee responsiveness and productivity, and according to a recent study by eMarketer, the potential benefits are prompting companies to increase their spending on mobile devices and services. However, not everyone is convinced. Some express concerns that mobile devices are just a distraction that will entice employees to play games, surf the web and cruise social networks, decreasing the amount of work actually being completed. Is enterprise mobility really making workers more productive? 

Businesses shouldn’t assume introducing mobile technology guarantees an increase in productivity. Many of the studies that address mobile productivity capture  respondents’ perception about mobile instead of measuring the actual impact.  In fact, it is possible that the expectation for employees to be constantly connected is causing them not to completely focus while they are at the office. It is also possible that employees are completing the same amount of work, but spreading it across more hours. The impact of perpetual accessibility may be that workers are taking longer (duration) to complete tasks than before the boundaries between work and personal life began to disappear.

Productivity can be difficult to measure. People sense that mobility is raising productivity, but in many cases, they fail to measure the actual effect. It has become normal to reply to work emails or take calls on a mobile device after leaving the office. However, many times employees also delay completing tasks because they rationalize they can complete it after work when they finish working out or running errands. In these cases, more work isn’t being done; it has just been shifted to another time.

The Mobile Productivity Business Case

If you are creating a business case for mobile investment, understanding the real productivity impacts is critical – especially in environments where technology budgets are declining, but mobile expenditures are increasing. Soft benefits are valuable, but providing measurable  business impacts is often more useful for justifying spending. To get started:

1. Identify business process that have or could have remote interactions and calculate how introducing mobility could improve or make the process faster. A remote interaction is any work that doesn’t occur at a desk or on-premises. For example, does your company have a travelling sales team. How often are potential buyers making a purchase from competitors when sales people have to return to the home office to get information to answer questions? Is waiting to the end of the day to input sales orders making the business less competitive?
2. Find business cases where using a mobile device may be less expensive than using a a traditional, fixed computer. For example, allowing warehouse workers to scan bar codes using a mobile phone might be less expensive to deploying multiple computers on-site. Another example is healthcare. How much time is it taking employees to walk back to a central terminal to enter patient details? How much does it cost to support these remote machines and their network connectivity?
3. Map the workflows for each of the identified business cases.
4. Assign a value to the incremental benefits that mobility introduces. For example, if sales people don’t need to return to the office to input orders they can visit more customers, which results in lower labor cost per sale.
5. Compare the calculated benefits to cost of purchasing and maintaining a mobile solution.