Start With What You Know
by Mark Diller / Dec 20
Measuring ROI on something like a digital workforce begins with good benchmarks. Put simply, you will never know the return on an investment unless you already have good insight into measurable quantities that characterize your workforce, both mobile and fixed.
For instance, you could measure the ROI of having a dispersed workforce by measuring any or all of the following qualities:
- Productivity: Is your business creating more or less widgets per employee per year?
- Job satisfaction: Are your people more or less happy that they’re working for you?
- Employee retention: Are your skilled employees sticking around longer, or are they reading want ads and jumping ship to your competitor?
- Creativity: Are your mobile workers — freed from the stultifying environs of a cubicle — being more innovative?
- Cost: Is it rising or falling per unit of work?
All of these are valid measures, but all depend on one thing: valid benchmarks. You don’t know if costs are rising unless you already have good insight into your operations. If you don’t know how productive you already are, you’ll never be able to know — really know — whether your mobile workforce is making you more productive or less.
So, first task: come up with three to five metrics that really define your business. You probably already know what those metrics are; if you don’t know, figure them out.
Second: take as much time as you need to come to a clear understanding of where you stand, right now, in terms of these metrics. Maybe you already have that data at your fingertips, maybe you need a few months to compile them. Don’t make any structural changes until you have a clear view of where you’re starting from.
Third: open the door to a mobile workforce. (What’s that you say — your workforce is already mobile? Well, that’s not ideal, but you can make do — just focus your analytics on the segment of the workforce that has not yet gone mobile.) Test and measure against your three to five benchmarks. Prepare reports.
Fourth: Adapt. The reports, and the metrics that inform them, tell you where things are working and where they are not. Fix the problems and let the successes continue to prosper.
Fifth: Continue to measure, tweak, and measure again. Then pat yourself on the back: you’re managing your mobile workforce and maximizing its ROI.
Comment
Join the conversation…
Collaborate with some of the leading minds in technology and define what it means to be a digital nomad. The community will collaborate to answer questions about:
- Security challenges of a mobile workforce
- Connectivity and access for nomad employees everywhere
- Ensuring productivity when employees are on the go
