Businesses that operate in multi-site environments are familiar with the complexity and difficulty of effectively managing their resources in the deployment of their services. As such, below are five tips for maximizing the efficiency of your field workforce management.
Provide Your Team with the Right Tools
The power of technology has revolutionized the way business is done. FWM is no different. An organization can ensure synergy amongst its team by using conducive software. Wingmate offers companies simple but powerful customer relationship management (CRM) software that is integrated with its own field reporting app. As you will see, this mobile app is perfect for teams involved in FWM.
Allow for Real-Time Communication and Visibility
Wingmate’s field reporting application allows field staff, such as drivers, technicians, couriers, and sales representatives, to provide real-time information on the go. The data that these staff members can input include sales and lead referrals, customer complaints, safety issues, service problems, and up-selling opportunities.
Managing a team with access to this functionality ensures that decision-makers are always in the know-how about performance and the need for any potential pivots.
Create a Culture of Trust and Transparency
Having an application that enables real-time communication among teams creates an environment that is conducive to trust and transparency. Outside of this, the need for a culture of trust and transparency in geographically diverse teams is immense.
As per a 2016 PWC survey of CEOs, 55% of them believe that the lack of trust in a workplace is an existential threat. Furthermore, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) reports that team members in high-trust workplaces experience 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement than counterparts in low-trust workplaces.
Set S.M.A.R.T. Daily and Weekly Goals
When team members are consistently physically distant from their coworkers and management, staying in sync with organizational goals can be a challenge. These team members do not enjoy the privilege of being in an office for the entirety of their working hours and tend to miss out on strategy sessions, feedback meetings, and other chance encounters relating to a change in objectives.
An excellent way to mitigate this problem is to set daily and weekly goals that adhere to the S.M.A.R.T. principles – Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. These principles are expanded upon below:
- Specific – Goals must be lucidly defined and unambiguous
- Measurable – The success of goals must be measured against a predefined set of criteria
- Achievable – The goal must be within a reasonable reach of those who aim to attain it
- Realistic – The goal must be realistic and relevant to the goals of the organization in question
- Timely – Goals must be set with a clear timeframe in mind to assist with resource management and create a sense of urgency
A study published by the Dominican University of California found that participants who wrote down their goals and were forced to provide weekly updates were 33% more likely to achieve their goals than participants who did not.
All micro-goals must be set in light of higher-order goals. For example, a team’s weekly goals should naturally follow from its medium- and long-term goals. Similarly, its daily goals should follow its weekly goals. Aside from assisting with FWM, this gives teams a more tangible roadmap to reaching their long-term targets.
Offer Timely and Clear Feedback
A natural addition to periodic goal-setting is the provision of feedback regarding goal progress. Field staff members are more readily able to improve their performance and make the necessary adjustments if they receive frequent feedback. Wingmate’s field reporting app allows management to gain an accurate view of their team’s execution which in turn leads to precise feedback.
As mentioned above, while these processes are important for all businesses, they are especially so for those that operate across multiple sites.
It is clear that FWM is a facet of many organizations’ core activities that is too important to leave to chance. Implementing appropriate software and technology is often the most pragmatic way for businesses to approach this complex task. Using a field reporting app such as Wingmate empowers management to take control of their field staff while improving overall group performance. Book a demo today to experience the power of Wingmate for yourself.
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