Moving Beyond BYOD, Toward the Mobilization of Work

In advance of our big Cornerstone Convergence client and partner conference in June, we will be talking about some of the issues facing organizations today as they try to find ways to Reimagine Work in our multi-generational, multi-geographical, multi-cultural, and location- and device-agnostic world. We hope you’ll join the conversation about working and managing smarter.

Add the word "mobile" to virtually any work-related function these days -- mobile meetings, mobile learning, mobile hiring, mobile marketing -- and most likely you've tapped into hot business or technology trend, not just an empty buzz-phrase. Why? Mobile and social technologies -- spawned from the consumer technology revolution of the last decade -- are taking root in almost every aspect of business today -- and changing the nature of work itself.

According to a recent Gartner survey, 60 percent of employees today use their personal mobile devices for work -- a number that will rise dramatically in the coming years. For HR managers and organizational leaders, those sort of adoption rates portend critical changes -- not just in how companies should manage a smart BYOD program, but also how to put all of those new devices and apps to work to get the most out of their people's time, talent, creativity and productivity.

Some of those changes start before making the hire. Three in five people have searched for a job using their mobile devices in the last year, while 68 percent of workers use their mobile devices to search for jobs once a week (or more), according to online job source Glassdoor. Current employees and future hires are going mobile to find a job -- recruiters and HR managers need to be aware of this trend as they’re mapping out their recruitment strategy.

The mobile-adoption shift doesn't apply just to the Millennials in an organization, either. The reliance on mobile services to both find and do work in new ways is multigenerational, multi-geographical, multi-cultural, and location- and device-agnostic. As a result, leaders need to support and leverage new patterns of mobile behavior throughout the company. Sixty percent of surveyed employees, for instance, think they have the right to work remotely with a flexible schedule. Executives can either fight that trend -- or find ways to work with it to improve and sustain employee retention, a positive company culture, and fruitful recruiting efforts.

To be sure, the IT department will be tasked with overseeing a good part of this change -- juggling devices, apps, and security requirements is a challenge for any company -- but how the changes impact the people falls most squarely on the HR team. Understanding the mobile work environment (including the cloud and the many online social platforms that exist today) is no longer a "nice-to-have" base of knowledge, or the expertise of tech startups. Increasingly, it's become a prerequisite to long-term success.

Photo credit: Can Stock