Facilitating Mobile and Virtual Work

A Global Sales Force

A sales force is marketing tailored product and system packages in developing countries. The manager has seven local workers and five others in China, Russia, Singapore, India, and the United States. The U.S. representative is responsible for activities in Africa. In addition, every 2 to 3 months an extended steering group, also including product managers, has its meeting. The meetings are supposed to be face-to-face, but often, customer appointments make this impossible, and virtual meetings and call conferences are used instead for communication and decision making.

Employees consider the distribution of their working locations, asynchronous ways of working, and the diversity of the people they meet to be the main complexity factors in their work (see Figure 84.1). They fly to their working destinations, passing through several time zones. Locally, they also use cars and trains. For example, one of the employees described his trips as follows:

When traveling, they work in the company's local office, at customers' premises, in conference venues, and in hotels. The purpose of moving is twofold: first, to meet and cowork with their own local teams, and second, working with customers to promote product sales. Diverse actors such as media people, local politicians, researchers, and company people are met. This brings with it various cultural, religious, and individual influences on the ways and contents of communication. Working times are a challenge. For example, an employee may start to work at 3:00 a.m. local time in order to be able to have a joint call conference with colleagues in Europe. And while working at home, he may participate in a virtual meeting at 9:00 p.m. in order to have a joint meeting with American colleagues. The sales force is mainly occupied with temporary projects; when a task is fulfilled, a project ends and a new one starts. Employees consider face-to-face meetings important, especially for convincing customers. When traveling, sales force employees use electronic connections sparingly.

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Figure 84.1 Global Sales Force's Complexity Factors

SOURCE: Hyrkkänen and Vartiainen, 2005, p. 93.

Figure 84.2 Mobile Maintenance Workers' Complexity Factors

SOURCE: Verburg, Testa, Hyrkkänen, and Johansson, 2006, p. 278.

Mobile Maintenance Employees in a City

A large-scale engineering and facility management enterprise employs people globally, but its teams work locally. Workers are organized into groups of maintenance workers under one supervisor. In each city, there are several service districts, each with its own responsible supervisor. The service districts are further divided into maintenance areas, each with one maintenance employee. Maintenance work consists of the service tasks defined in the maintenance [Page II-350]contract, alarm situations demanding immediate response, and possible on-call and specified tasks (Figure 84.2).

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