What Is Mobile Workforce Management?

As the industrial landscape evolves, office-focused employees are evolving into a more mobile workforce. According to a report by the research and consulting firm Verified Market Research, the Mobile Workforce Management Market size was valued at USD 5.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 15.32 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 13.16% from 2024 to 2031. This situation can be attributed to technological advances that make managing the mobile workforce easier.

As their business grows global, it’s vital for organizations to find new ways to attract, retain and best capitalize on their mobile workforce. For that, Mobile Workforce Management has emerged as an essential process for many organizations across several industries, including construction, transportation, hospitality, manufacturing, education and more.

Mobile workforce management involves using tools and processes to manage all types of mobile workers, including remote workers, field workers, or workers who provide on-site services. It’s how organizations manage their mobile workforce, devices, equipment, services, and operations outside of the workplace premises.

By mobile workforces, we refer to field-based workers who operate in locations other than their offices. Many of these jobs are deskless in nature. In the past, mobile workers were confined to a few industries (utility, construction, etc.) or professions (technicians, sales).

But in recent years, particularly since the pandemic, they have come to include remote workers too. As a result, mobile workers are now more mainstream than ever. As new-age employees demand greater flexibility at work, organizations need to tailor their workforce management solutions for mobile workers too.

Higher Productivity

With mobile workforce management solutions, mobile workers can log in and out, communicate and collaborate, and perform many functions that a typical workforce management facilitates. With 100% uptime, workers have continuous access to and use of central resources and tools from anywhere, any time. Ensuring this promotes agility at work even while they are away from workplaces. Furthermore, with automated workflows and schedule planning, the productivity and utilization of resources increase manifold.

Workforce Visibility

Since mobile workers aren’t available at the workplace, gaining a real-time view of their daily operations is difficult. To deal with this, organizations need a central hub that records where the worker currently works, in which job and role, and how they fit into the organization’s projects pipeline.

Besides this, to prevent misuse of time and resources during fieldwork, organizations can employ mobile workforce management solutions that offer geo-monitoring and geo-fencing capabilities that monitor and manage how workers clock in/out to jobs.

Real-time access to critical information enables managers to make data-driven decisions. Furthermore, it allows organizations to plan for future projects based on the workers’ schedules and availability.

Customer Experience

Empowering your mobile workers with real-time access to company resources can help them do what matters most to your bottomline: to better satisfy customers. They can promptly assist customers with any information on-site rather than having to do it later when they’re back at the workplace. Moreover, managing a central repository of information with instant access and real-time communication enables them to offer personalized service.

However, managing mobile workers can bring a unique set of challenges to the fore.

Here are a few of them.

Balancing Trust With Security

To help build trust with mobile workers, it’s vital to equip them with the necessary skills, devices and resources to do their jobs. Sometimes, mobile workers use their own devices at work, which can give rise to multiple security-related issues. Be that as it may, organizations must ensure that the workers’ devices (whether owned by the organization or the worker) are secure against cyber attacks.

Balancing Access With Privacy

To empower mobile workers to win or interact with clients, they must have access to critical client and industry information in real time. Organizations must invest in the IT and mobile infrastructure to facilitate this. As they do this, they must also ensure role-based access even as the workers’ privacy is protected.

Balancing Supervision With Autonomy

It’s important to find ways to supervise mobile workers operating on the field to avoid issues like time theft. To do this, organizations must manage the workers’ schedules and track their activities & performance. However, employers and managers must ensure it doesn’t come across as micro-managing. Workers must be allowed the autonomy to work within a broad framework.

Balancing Flexibility With Productivity

Since they’re on the field, mobile workers may have a better sense of how to approach and execute the work. Organizations must provide them with the flexibility to plan tasks and schedules in a way that works best for them.

Despite mobile workers being fairly mainstream today, managing them comes with its own set of challenges.

Mobile-Friendly Apps

Since mobile workers operate with devices like smartphones and tablets, organizations cannot just rely on desktop applications. They need apps that are tailor-made for mobile environments too. To this end, organizations must either create custom mobile apps in-house or provide access to third-party apps that can function smoothly on various devices without creating any security issues. By providing mobile apps tailored to the workers’ unique needs, organizations demonstrate their trust in them.

Secure Virtual Ecosystem

Since mobile workers use devices and virtual environments that are not under the organization’s direct control, their security could be compromised. Therefore, organizations must invest in securing their devices and environments. Further, organizations must allow for the use of only those devices that pass their security tests. Moreover, they can train employees in cybersecurity. However, a commitment to employee privacy will go a long way in establishing the organization’s employee-centricity.

Tasks and Productivity Tracking

Organizations must find tools to track the tasks of mobile workers without infringing on their privacy. Tracking movements is largely considered counterproductive, as workers do not approve of it. The way autonomy is accommodated into the productivity tracking system is a measure of an organization’s employee culture.

Real-Time Resource Allocation

Organizations can also manage a mobile workforce with real-time or near real-time resource allocation that can help them meet customer commitments in a timely manner. They can have expertise-based resources ready at all times which can help with reducing service delivery times. This also helps in keeping projects on track in terms of time and budget.

Mobile Workforce Management Software enables organizations to manage their mobile workers, especially when they are outside of their workplaces.

It’s designed to help improve an organization’s ability to best capitalize on its mobile workforce. Further, it’s tailored to empower workers to be productive and service their clients effectively.

While different software solutions may have different features, these most commonly include the following:

• Enable secure remote log in and out
• Facilitate shift and project scheduling
• Help workers communicate seamlessly with their global teams
• Enable a two-way flow of real-time task updates between mobile workers and the organization
• Find new ways to track productivity that are fair and accurate

Since mobile workforces are now mainstream, organizations must gear up to implement the mobile workforce management software that best meets their needs. A cloud-powered time-tracking system can best serve the software as it enables the automatic capture of accurate work time data. The benefits of such a time-tracking system can also spill over to project management and billing.

A software solution with the above features can help mobile workers focus on their core functions instead of spending time on peripheral tasks.

When it comes to mobile workforce management, what’s required is a solution that empowers your workforce to work without interruptions from anytime and anywhere. With Deltek | Replicon’s workforce management solution, you can do that and much more. Its AI-powered mobile timesheets help track and manage time & attendance accurately, assist with shift & schedule management as well as dynamic assignments, and also enable accurate project costing and payroll generation.

With its GPS tracking and geofencing capabilities, you get another layer of accuracy for data on employees on the move while they get the flexibility to punch in and out from anywhere. By capturing data automatically from more than 100 apps, it can provide pre-filled timesheets to submit, cutting down the manual work for your mobile workforce.

Most companies offering mobile workforce management solutions are niche-driven. They are designed for a specific segment, industry, region, or utility. For instance, there are companies that specialize in managing sales teams. Armed with this head start, they are able to improve their services over time.

However, such niche-driven solutions are ill-equipped to serve the needs of today and tomorrow. Organizations now need a partner that can support the scaling of their business, sustain technological changes, and help navigate the changing landscape of mobile work.

Today, more than ever before, we have the technology required to manage a mobile workforce with empathy and precision. The increased availability of cost-effective mobile devices, mobile apps, and cloud & wireless networks (among others) makes it easier for organizations to manage their global mobile workforce.