Why mobilising your workforce makes sense, whatever the weather

If you are reading this in April or even May, we should, hopefully, have waved goodbye to the coldest winter weather for at least three decades. However, the recent headlines about weather-related disruption to transport, communication and power lines will remain painfully fresh to many.

Estimates of what the winter weather cost the economy vary between some £600m and £900m a day. Those are hefty figures but they will come as no surprise to businesses which struggled to get staff into the office or products to their customers.

 Perhaps these businesses could learn from utility companies. The utilities can be hit particularly hard by adverse weather and have sophisticated emergency response plans in place to counter weather-related disruption, keep supplies going and avoid potential regulatory sanctions.

When responding to exceptional events, the potential benefits to the utilities of using a mobile work and data management platform, such as Sigma Seven’s GeoField suite, are clear and well known. By equipping every level of the emergency response team with all the mapping information and workflow tools they need to get on with the job, the task can be completed safely, quickly and efficiently.
However, those benefits can be realised not just by the utilities. Any other sector or organisation that employs a field force, such as environmental monitoring, local government or engineering firms, could become more efficient by using technology to fully mobilise their workers. Only by giving them all the mapping information, work and data management tools they need to complete their tasks at the point of action will they be a truly mobilised workforce. The benefits of mobile location-based work management platforms could even be extended to workers whose tasks are mainly office-based.

If unable to get to the office or their point of work because of weather disruption, then some workers, for example, those in council planning offices, could do their jobs without having to get to the office. But only if they were properly equipped with the information they need to do their job in their hands. Emergency response crews and council planners may not think their jobs are very similar but GeoField can help both when bad weather or other unforeseen circumstances strike.