When you think about mobile working, what springs to mind? Working from home, maybe sales teams on the road. But it’s wider than that, it’s working any place that isn’t your office – and there’s so much your business can gain from it.

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By 2017, more than 300 million people will bring their own smartphones to work, according to a report from Good Technology. The world of work is changing and it’s important to recognise the value of mobile working, both for your staff and for the business.

From attracting talent, to increased productivity and cost cutting, in this blog post we look at the benefits your business can reap from mobile working, and share practical advice on how to manage a mobile workforce.

Reduce your overheads
With the typical office costing upwards of £6,000 per employee per year, it’s no surprise that having staff in a physical office costs money – lots of it. With mobile working, you reduce your physical office size, and reduce your costs by offering your workforce the opportunity to work from home, on the road, or hot-desk.

Evidence shows there’s an appetite for home working and flexi-time, with research from Arise finding that 25% of employees would accept a reduction in pay in order to avoid their commute, and 58% would accept a lower salary to work from home.

Attract new talent
If your businesses has a hard time recruiting qualified staff, remote working could be the answer, opening up your organisation to a new pool of talent. For example, three quarters of those who are not currently in work would consider a return to work if they could work remotely, and two thirds of mature workers say they would delay retirement by around 6 years if they too could adopt telework – meaning businesses benefit from their experienced workers for longer and for less cost.

Hardware that’s not hard-wired
Think staff who work remotely demand costly equipment? Think again. There’s a considerable rise in BYOD (bring your own device) culture in business, which sees staff utilising their own mobiles, laptops and tablets in place of work systems. Ensuring that you have a connection to your mobile workers is paramount, but that doesn’t necessarily mean lots of expensive gadgets – research by Holiday Inn Express found that 58% of mobile workers travel without a laptop.

Just remember that remote workers still need to be managed, just like your office staff. The main thing is to keep communication and information flowing. This can be on the phone, over email, or by using a cloud based business management solution – whatever works for you and your team.

Keep in touch
With the rise of the cloud, it’s now easier than ever to share information and stay in touch with employees. Files move effortlessly without disks or drives thanks to Dropbox, and you can have a face-to-face meeting without even being the same country with Skype. These days, we expect software to work whenever, and wherever we do – and business management systems should do the same. If you can access your emails and music through the cloud, why not your timesheets, expenses and performance reports?

Some software offers the best of both cloud and traditional hosting. For example, Sage 200 Extra provides the benefits of stable, reliable desktop software, and the choice to also link your data in the cloud to easily share data with mobile workers.

Take a look at cloud-based software from Sage
Our cloud-based business management solution, Sage 200 Extra Online is ideal for growing businesses that want more than just accounts software. Sage 200 Extra Online will help you manage and co-ordinate your business anywhere, anytime, with the added peace of mind that your data is safe and secure.
Featured article: http://blog.sage.co.uk/blog/index.php/2015/09/lets-go-mobile/