Aligning your business under a unified battle standard has been suggested as the most critical element in meeting targets, incentivizing growth, and managing change. Aligned workers are happy workers, and happy workers are productive, creative, and communicative.
Executives are well aware of how much alignment affects performance. That doesn’t make it any easier to achieve, though. Research from the Harvard Business Review reported that 40% of managers indicated failure to align as the single greatest challenge to executing their company’s strategy (closely followed by failure to coordinate across teams).
Worse still, a mere 55% of the middle managers surveyed could name even one of their company’s top five priorities. Simply put, when the leaders responsible for conveying the battle plan to the troops are given five opportunities to express their organization’s long term goals, roughly half of them fail to conjure even one.
For organizations operating on a global scale, aligning remote and disparate silos of workers can test the strength of middle management. Often it exposes the weaknesses associated with communicating data across vast distances and time zones; some teams and levels of management will be informed while the rest are left in the dark.
When you see that crossing cultures and continents means that even management strains to see the company vision, the obvious solution to aligning goals lies in controlling the way employees collect and share information. It means mitigating the “game of telephone” effect by making communication coherent, collective, and clear. That’s an objective that a mobile audit solution intuitively and easily accomplishes.
Alignment at your fingertips
When you consider the connectivity that the internet allows, it sometimes seems like the world map has folded so that every corner of the Earth touches another. It’s as if the globe has shrunk like a cotton T-shirt left in the dryer overnight. A doctor in Portugal can chat with a painter in the US, or an engineer in Australia can video message a teacher in China— all on device that fits in their pockets. Utilizing this technology to seamlessly align remote teams is the next logical step for an enterprise.
By offering field operations a Participant Portal accessible by smartphone or tablet, you instantly bridge the gap between the office and the field. When equipped with an always-on hub that allows them to view and complete tasks, teams can stay connected 24 hours a day, regardless of where they are.
Task management goes mobile
Mobile solutions are the equivalent of gathering all your teams in the same conference room and talking through their responsibilities one at a time— minus the chaos of everyone talking at once. From a single online hub, management can ensure employees have every resource they need to meet their goals efficiently and on time. That level of clarity that cultivates confidence and builds connectivity.
Here are five ways that mobile task management aligns teams in the field:
#1: Clear communication
Successful alignment can never happen without crisp correspondence. Mobile forms nail down the loose bits of data so that every packet of information stays intact, even when they travel from the away team to the administrators back at the home office. Safety inspection deadlines and incident reports that once waited on the sidelines to be delivered by email or postal service now step up to bat immediately.
Progress updates register in real-time, available for supervisors to monitor as remote workers carry out their tasks. Management can respond quickly and communicate the next steps for field personnel almost instantly. Even if team members and leaders are thousands of miles apart, administrators can get a vantage point from which to view ground level and understand problems as they arise. That allows them to get “hands-on” without dispatching management to the scene.
#2: Defined tasks
Everything runs smoothly when the right people take on the right jobs. Mobile task management allows you to create and assign tasks to specific individuals, teams, and divisions. You can establish user permissions that limit which people have access to different data clusters, ensuring that they get only what they need to see and nothing else. Compartmentalizing tasks cuts down on confusion and promotes clarity.
Email correspondence can’t match the kind of consistency that automatic deadline alerts and conditional task generation offers.
#3: Automated workflows
Workflow automation makes everyone’s jobs simpler. Employees can complete their tasks without the hassle of double-checking their duties and more can be done in less time. By customizing forms based on the individual, job, and location, it’s possible to auto-fill key data and prevent errors that might occur during manual entry. Not only does this save time spent re-entering basic information while engaged in repetitive tasks such as daily safety inspections, it reduces the risk of mistakes.
Follow-up tasks can be automatically assigned based on the outcome of other tasks. Likewise, alerts can be sent and subsequent tasks scheduled so that work flows seamlessly. Both of these features act as time-saving mechanisms that eliminate time-to-decision and downtime.
#4: Simple analysis
With everything stored in the cloud, there’s no more waiting for mail or faxes to arrive, no more digging through emails or hunting for forms, and no more masses of data to scan from paper to digital format. Everything is stored in one place, making it easy to search and organize.
When facing time-sensitive tasks in need of fast analysis and rapid feedback like safety inspections or incident reports, the ability to view and analyze data in real-time can make the difference in maintaining a safe working environment. Quick response time sets mobile task management apart from other digital platforms and spreadsheets.
#5: Continued improvement
Successful alignment is about learning from operations and leveraging data analytics for continuous improvement. When a business intelligence dashboard lets you visualize all the information, generating corrective actions is just a step away. Custom reports are tailored to your process, allowing you to intuitively to pull just the metrics you need— and present them to key decision-makers.
No matter where your team operates, mobile task management brings individuals closer together for better alignment and communication in field operations.
Align your on-site inspections and maintenance processes: Request a demo to see these features in action!