Mobility and the Truly Gruntled Employee
How many co-workers do you know who are truly gruntled (that is, the opposite of disgruntled)? What variables separate the gruntled from the disgruntled?
For starters, think about your day at work. Come in to the office, log-in, and instantly you’re buried under an avalanche of e-mail. Try to dig your way out (while running from meeting to meeting), eventually there’s a glimpse of daylight, but it’s a runaway train headed right at you, labeled “your actual job, which is not answering e-mails”.
A big part of the problem is the nature of how we work. Sitting in front of a big screen, with a hard, fast, secure connection is great, except that you’ve paved the way for a massive amount of information to head in your direction, which it does at top speed.
So what happens when information is made available on a mobile device? I know a lot of folks in the mobility space pound the “anytime/anywhere” drum (which is great, if you like working all the time- I don’t). However, like a lot of people, I don’t mind throwing some otherwise down-time against my workload when I’m actually not at work, but of course, my efficiency on a mobile device will be different.
One of the core drivers of efficiency is balancing the signal-to-noise ratio. That big fast machine in your office is very noisy in terms of how much information it shoves at you, whereas the small fast machine in your pocket tends to filter out a lot of noise because the smaller footprint automatically reduces the level of information that can get through. The real question is, is the right information getting through? When you see something on your iPhone or Galaxy Tablet, are you seeing the really critical information you need to be more effective (signal), or are you getting a lot of extraneous information (noise). I’ve said before that a smaller display space forces pithiness and prioritization, so given this, are the right items making it to the top of your display?
This therefore all comes down to workflow. Mobilizing workflow forces the company to rethink what their employees do, since they are by definition doing it differently. We recently completed a survey of CIOs via LinkedIn, and one of the stats that jumped out was that only 33% of respondents had an enterprise-wide strategy for mobility, which means 67% did not. Out of the “not” group, 10% had (amazingly) no plans at all, 27% would get to it sometime in the next year, and 30% kinda/sorta had a plan, but not thought through at the enterprise level. The scary part is the respondents were CIOs, who by definition are supposed to have a long-range perspective on things like this. And what about the folks on the business side, the folks who are actually out there selling and dealing with customers in a workflow-driven context? Do you suppose they’re thinking about mobilizing enterprise workflows? I reckon not.
The 33% who get it are the ones who will have truly gruntled employees. The other 67% will have varying levels of disgruntleness, and let me tell you, if your employees are disgruntled, you can bet that vibe will be passed to your customers, your partners, etc. Enterprises, whether driven by the technical or business side, have a narrowing window of opportunity to get ahead of this curve. A year from now, we’ll have a permanently disgruntled class of employees (the 10% with no plans), 57% who are in varying stages of de-gruntling, and 33% who are happily gruntling along, and probably creaming the remaining two thirds of the market who were slow to adopt. So given all this, what are your long range plans for gruntling your employees?