For most sales focused organisations any employee down time is dead time and constitutes a direct impact on the profit margin. Many companies are chasing the Elysian dream of reducing this loss and therefore driving up margins through the implementation of remote access technologies, but they may well be missing the point entirely

In reality, the provision of gadgets to field operatives without a unified team communication model will not improve, but in fact actually reduce focus and lead to a decrease in staff efficiency. Let me put it another way: give your employees more to play with, without enabling real benefits in terms of team mobility and frankly you are wasting your money.

There are a variety of elements which should be considered when implementing a deployment strategy of this kind, and yes you do need a strategy for this to be effective.

1. Provide effective communication between remote operatives, ideally through voice, data and messaging. Do not be lulled into thinking that what is needed is an office desktop on the mobile device. Remote field operatives need much more support than their office bound counterparts (see this article http://EzineArticles.com/?id=245765 for guidance on implementation strategy)

2. Implement a means by which the co-ordination of the team and the status of progress on assigned projects/tasks/activities can be easily evaluated by line management. Make sure remote staff are on task by maintaining a dialogue with them in the field and actively offering support to them by whatever means are available.

3. Make your remote staff part of your joined-up corporate business information strategy. All workers regardless of location, should be provided all the information they require in order to maximise productivity.

Office located facilities should include drop-in hot-desking and comfortable meeting room facilities. These are vitally important as you staff will remain as ever pack animals by nature and group thinking/working and socialising should be actively encouraged.

Home office facilities should fully enable staff to use corporate resources in a secure environment. It is key that steps are taken to avoid an imferred devaluing within the organisation of the contribution made by remote, home office based staff.

Remote access technology deployments should include access to corporate information as above, but also include team centric information sharing and project management controls. The advent of full cross-platform mobility solutions (such as mobile java based solutions) and collaborative web based virtual team workspaces (such as sharepoint) now allow the same level of cross team information collaboration between field and home workers as previously enjoyed by office based staff.

In summary, in order to gain maximum benefit from your remote field and home based workers.. your organisation needs to support them properly through the use of both team based management techniques and collaborative technology solutions. Failure to do this will lead to a failure to exploit this extremely cost effective, productive and efficient corporate strategy.