Are Your Digital Nomads Showing You The Money?

by Joseph Hunkins / Dec 11

Digital Nomads:

As fixed office workers move into the growing legions of Digital Nomads it is easy to see how in theory ROI would improve as a result of the increased flexibility, decreased need for office space, improved morale, and other factors.    However these clear advantages must be balanced against the challenges faced by businesses with a mobile workforce.   Are your employees as productive remotely in environments that are often unsupervised?    Are your costs to maintain your Digital Nomads balanced by savings or productivity improvements?

To answer most ROI questions it’s best to try to eliminate as many potentially confusing variables as possible, so a good initial approach to answering the question of ROI might be to task existing employees with the same jobs but allow them for *half their time* to work remotely, not check in to the office for extended periods, and work from home.   During this experiment measure productivity carefully in the two environments – office and mobile – and for most you’ll likely see clear patterns emerge.

Clearly however personalities will matter greatly and it may be wise to experiment with various options to see which of your staff is best suited to the mobile work lifestyle and who will perform best in the office environment.

Our own experience as our travel websites grew to dozens of workers was generally that *closely supervised* workers were generally more productive than unsupervised though we had problems in the office environment (which was very open and relaxed) as well as when we allowed people to work from home.

HP has an excellent series devoted specifically to the issue of improving ROI via a mobile workforce. They point out that the inexpensive availability of secure connectivity via wireless broadband, bluetooth, and other technologies has effectively freed up workers and businesses from the constraints of only a few years ago.

Obviously, some jobs lend themselves beautifully to working at home for companies far away – in effect a form of digital nomad “couch potato”.  As FastCompany reports, JetBlue manages a large part of their reservations workforce remotely using mobile technologies.   Jet Blue has a cadre of working moms who use mobile technologies to book flights all over the system.    Highly skilled workers are available who might otherwise not be for office environments, and all that is required are broadband internet connections and phone which can be VOIP.   In this example the ROI is easy to measure as these workers are doing *exactly the same* tasks in our out of the office.

Summary:

Generally I would suggest that mobile workforce ROI will remain highest when you are dealing with highly motivated staff such as management and commissioned employees, and worst (in fact negative) when you are trying to “mobilify” employees who are generally just putting in their time.

Source links:
HP: http://www.hp.com/sbso/productivity/howto/wireless_improveROI/plan-it.html
Fast Company:  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/82/jetblue_agents.html

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