Employees are an organization’s strength and probably, the most precious asset. Every year, organizations spend a lot of time, cost and effort to hire industry-smart professionals, so that they can attain their goals and reach the pinnacle of success, as envisioned. But unfortunately, the road to success comes with multiple roadblocks. The major hurdles that businesses across the globe are facing today include up keeping workplace productivity, employee engagement and remote workforce management.
Especially in the pandemic-hit world when the majority of employees operate remotely, even a single loophole or loose thread can affect your business’ fabric in multiple ways. What if the employee fails to meet the deadlines of a critical business mission? What if the backup plan doesn’t look promising?
The possibilities are endless and complex, but the solution is simple. In today’s scenario, even your most productive employees and enterprises need agile management methods such as Mobile Device Management and endpoint solutions to effectively manage mobile devices used for business, monitor activities and secure the business-critical servers and databases to obtain maximum employee output and overall workplace productivity and engagement.
Challenges of the Modern Workplace
Generally, a typical workday is assumed to commence with an employee logging in, checking the tasks assigned, completing what’s pending, taking follow-ups and eventually getting the job done for that day by signing off and completing the work hours with the maximum percentage of compliance. Probably, it also involves a little bit of scheduling for the next day or sometimes fixing certain critical issues. Right?
But in reality, does it exactly happen the way it should happen?
Let’s take a closer look at some of the major obstacles affecting workplace efficiency one by one.
Working in Uncontrolled Environments
The workforce today majorly operates from remote locations. Earlier, the employees used to work in a controlled office environment fostered inside secured and spectacular corporate towers. There were obstacles back then, but they were minor in comparison to the challenges that organizations confront now, because working outside the office is not as simple as it sounds. Technical concerns, prolonged device unavailability, hardware-related issues, and working hours differences while working from different places and time zones all provide challenges for remote employees. These challenges are often overlooked. This results in lower productivity, even when the employees are in front of their systems for the whole day long.
Easy Employee Distraction
Modern-day businesses prefer hiring tech-savvy employees with a progressive mindset. But unfortunately, that doesn’t guarantee a workforce that doesn’t get distracted. In absence of restrictions, employees tend to get easily distracted by social media, OTT platforms and similar apps and websites that devour the majority of their productive hours.
We, as humans, find such distractions as an easy escape, when we feel that no one’s monitoring. Even the best employees fall victim to it and which results in their overall performance and eventually shows up in target failures.
Unmanaged BYOD
BYOD is trending, but employees face a lot of troubles due to BYO devices which are unmanaged. They access organizational documents through unmanaged devices and networks which can be a potential threat to the corporate data security. This could, for example, result from employees opening malicious websites and links. Cybercriminals are more active than ever and they keep looking for such loopholes. Clicking on malicious links can pose a threat to your corporate data. The hackers can erase your company’s sensitive data and lock your system for ransom. This results in the workplace taking strict actions against the employee, and of course, eventually, such incidents result in demotivated employees.
Lack of Real-Time Office Engagement and Collaboration
Real-time office conversations and involvement are one of the primary issues that today’s workforce encounters. Employees become disinterested, miscommunications occur and misunderstandings take place across teams as a result.
Though certain applications and softwares are proving beneficial as they help employees collaborate and communicate easily, unfortunately, most businesses do not consider this as a challenge at all. Demotivated and non-engaged employees can not become the building blocks of a strong business empire. This issue is underrated, often overlooked, and is a potential factor in decreased productivity.
However, intelligent MDM solutions can help businesses combat these challenges smartly and effectively. Let’s explore what MDM is, what benefits are stored-in and how businesses can benefit from MDMs in terms of workplace productivity and overall development.
What is an MDM solution?
Mobile devices are all over the place, unmanaged, dispersed, and unprotected. They represent a serious danger to company security and the working environment in general. Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions are in high demand because they allow enterprises to remotely control, monitor, and secure their devices and endpoints.
Thus, providing a fresh breeze to the IT departments and industry leaders as unmanaged and unmonitored mobile devices are a real threat to security and can be potentially dangerous to organizations.
Features of MDM
Modern MDM systems offer a wealth of options to benefit from when it comes to employee engagement and productivity. Let’s take a quick stroll down the feature-rich road. Some of the prominent features are as follows.
- Easy Enrollment
- Easy deployment
- Bulk Enrollment of devices
- Geofencing
- Security features
- Task automation
- Diverse OS compatibility
- Content Management
- Application Management
How to Maximize Productivity at Workplace with MDM Solutions?
According to Gallup’s meta analysis¹, companies with a highly engaged workforce are 21 percent more profitable. When employees feel engaged, motivated, and monitored, they work better and produce the best.
Modern-day mobile device management software, with a plethora of features, are tirelessly working to manage, monitor, and secure mobile devices scattered worldwide so that the workforce remains focused and involved. Let’s discover how to maximize workplace productivity with the latest and modern MDM solutions.
By locking down devices as single-app or multi-app kiosks
Modern-day MDMs help improve employee productivity and compliance by locking the devices with a single app or multi-app based on specific business requirements. By leveraging such powerful benefits, any business can attain maximum levels of efficiency by keeping employees distraction-free and engaged at all times. In absence of readily-available distractions like social media apps, music, movies during work hours, employees will behave responsibly and feel answerable at all times.
By allowing and restricting websites and applications
Browsing behaviors can go wrong if the employee unintentionally spends too much time on the internet. A whole day of production can cost any business a lot. Therefore, the latest MDMs come with smart features like allowing/restricting websites and apps, which not only increases production manifold but also saves the employees and the businesses from any kind of random misleading information.
By giving IT admins full visibility and control of their device inventories
Generally, most of the modern-day MDMs come with such a feature that gives the power to the IT admins or the leaders to have a bird’s eye view of their entire device inventory and employee activity through a common control center i.e their unified dashboard. They can know about device hardware, battery, storage, data usage, latest connectivity stats, etc. in real-time, which keeps the IT infrastructure ready and updated almost all the time. This helps them to understand what’s happening or going wrong, or out of the way in terms of workforce productivity so that they can take quick actions based on those intelligent reports.
By tracking the location of the devices
Sometimes, while working remotely, employees get disinterested, lose track of work, and sometimes fall for distractions. MDM solutions help track the locations of the employees, can take updates from them in real-time, and help them keep engaged and at par with the rest of the workforce in terms of work.
Some modern-day MDMs also allow features like geofencing which disallows any employee to move devices from one location to another, without IT admins’ permissions.
By effectively troubleshooting over the air
Device downtimes and technical issues are real roadblocks when it comes to productivity. Businesses rely on devices for work, and if devices are not intact; for obvious reasons employee productivity will go down.
MDM solutions, with their remote troubleshooting, cast, and control capacities, enable the administrators to fix such issues in real-time so that work doesn’t suffer and targets are met, as planned.
By streamlining workflows
Mobile Device Management software allows automation which reduces redundant IT tasks. It benefits the overall IT department as they can focus more on other important tasks that need due attention. MDMs streamline important workflows, help IT admins, and thus help in overall business success, eventually.
By segregating work and personal profiles
Employees no longer have to carry separate devices for work and personal use. Today, the next-gen workforce demands multitasking technology to multitask. Modern-day MDM solutions provide the option to securely containerize employees’ work and personal profiles on the same mobile device. With this feature, employees can easily have access to their work profile and personal profile, without wasting time switching between devices.
Effective BYOD management
MDMs help to manage, monitor, and secure BYO devices to obtain maximum results. Today, as the workforce operates remotely, it is the need of the hour for businesses to effectively manage BYO devices. Certain MDM solutions provide extensive BYOD management features so that employees can work from their nests, comfortably. Not only do they stay happy this way, but their productivity increases manifold.
Conclusion
To be honest, businesses do not function solely on the basis of equipment, tools, and technology. But, actually, they rely on their cherry-picked employees for operational success.
It is a truth, indeed, that even the most loyal and productive employees face productivity issues at some point of time in their career. Picking the right MDM solution based on specific business requirements can help your workplace transition into a more focused and successful one. MDMs help businesses prepare for the future by allowing them to manage, monitor, and secure their employees and their devices.