The transmission and distribution of electricity grows more complex with each passing year, but the effects of COVID-19 proved especially challenging. Within weeks of the start of the pandemic, as many workers shifted to remote working and others simply sheltered in their homes, average home electrical use in the U.S. increased more than 22% over the previous year's levels, driven by a 35% increase in mid-day demand, according to Sense home data.

Electrical utilities have had to adjust to changing usage patterns and heightened residential demand while dealing with their COVID-related safety and staffing challenges. Aside from the pandemic and the regular workload of responding to accidents and outages, it seems that providers today deal with ever more frequent natural disasters, from raging fires to hurricanes and uncharacteristically severe winter storms that strain circuits, whip transmission wires, or weigh them down under heavy layers of ice. Add in the increasing sophistication required to manage distributed generation and maintain service while integrating diverse, often sporadic input from renewable sources, and the need to draw maximum efficiency and productivity from each worker has never been higher.

These factors beg the question: How can operators empower their workforce to not only meet these escalating challenges as they’re moving from job to job, but also drive efficiency and productivity that deliver positive business outcomes?

Empowering the dynamic workforce

Utility providers are realizing that empowering employees with mobile technology is a key to achieving greater performance, much like their counterparts in other essential industries that rely heavily on frontline workers. As control room operators, field engineers, linemen and other specialists execute a multitude of critical services and repairs, they rely on mobile devices to stay updated on work orders, report progress on tasks and provide field documentation, all while moving throughout and in between job sites.

In a national workforce survey conducted by a mobile device management software company in January 2021, employees across categories surveyed (essential, desk-less, remote and office-based) said they believe mobility plays an increasingly important role in enabling them to do their jobs. With the majority having said they believe mobile phones or tablets play a key role in helping them be productive at work, respondents also noted they’re using their devices more heavily while on the job than they were a year ago. Over a third (about 36%) said their mobile device usage at work had increased more or significantly more than it was a year earlier. Only about 7% said it had decreased significantly.

The study also looked at how working hours have evolved over the past year and found the pandemic has ushered in heavier workloads. Over 40% of survey respondents said they are working more than they were a year ago. Coupled with working longer hours and increased use of mobile while at work, it should come as no surprise that most people surveyed noted they believe the lines between work and personal life are being blurred. Forty-six percent acknowledged this to be the case, with 23% stating they wish they could find a better balance.

As those blurred lines claim more of a worker's time, both on the job site, and often, at home or elsewhere, mobile technology has become an increasingly essential means of taking care of personal business throughout the day. During an authorized break from their work duties, for example, an employee with a smartphone may pay their water bill online, order their family's groceries for delivery, confirm that their child has arrived home from school safely, or catch up on personal emails, all without leaving the workplace. Back on the clock, the same employee may use that same device to call up reference maps or confirm the status of a restored electrical circuit.

At the same time, few industries rival utility operations for the number and frequency of safety risks that their workers must mitigate daily. Enabling frontline workers to access the full range of applications and resources they need via a smartphone or tablet is a powerful advantage that can help them to address dangerous situations safely. If not properly managed, however, the same volume of mobile input can vie for a worker's attention when absolute concentration is required.

Maximizing mobility

Many organizations struggle with what they view as potentially conflicting goals of embracing mobile devices at work and maintaining safety. Some employers may regulate mobility in the workplace through overarching policies designed to restrict usage. Others may try to provide company-issued, single-use devices in the hopes of providing mobile tools while prohibiting the use of personal technology. Both approaches suffer from inherent difficulties that limit their success.

These stances have become even less tenable since consumers have taken the lead in driving IT innovation in the enterprise. Today's worker expects the devices they use on the job to provide the same functionality as their personal phones and other devices. However, corporate-issued equipment often does not perform at the same level as the device a user has personally selected and outfitted with the applications they deem most useful.

Prohibitive usage policies not only preclude the performance advantages that mobile devices can offer to the organization, but are also out of step with a modern workforce that has come to view personal technology as an essential right and a key to productivity. In the same national survey mentioned earlier, nearly 62% of respondents said they agree mobile phones or tablets play a key role in helping them be productive at work. Significantly, 56% of those polled in the survey said yes, they believe it is their right to use their mobile device during work hours. That majority holds the ability to use their phone on the job to be an inherent right rather than a workplace amenity.

Prohibitions also run counter to the advancement of increasingly mobile business practices. A steady stream of new processes and applications are emerging to serve the mobile workforce and are transforming the way jobs get done. And the revolution is far from over. The mobile worker population, already 78.5 million strong in 2020, is projected to grow to 95.5 million in 2024 when it will account for 60% of U.S. workers, according to IDC projections.

To succeed and remain competitive, utility enterprises must find ways to empower this growing portion of the workforce to safely perform at maximum productivity and efficiency. Rather than withhold access, businesses must recognize that tablets and mobile phones are productivity platforms that support efficient operations and smarter work throughout the organization. They connect workers in the field with access to the same resources available in an office, making them a powerful means of doing flexible work without compromising worker safety or business security when managed properly.

Mobile workers need and expect to have access to the tools and functionality they wield in their personal lives. That is why features such as video chat and mobile credit card processing are replacing legacy workflows. Progressive businesses are adapting processes for mobile compatibility because the benefits of today's advanced mobile capabilities far exceed the difficulties of incorporating their use. To limit employees' mobile device functionality and access is to constrain their ability to meet the challenges of performing their jobs. For example, one utility employer might view mobile devices on a worksite as a safety risk – moving from job site to job site, distracted drivers can cause potentially fatal accidents. However, that same driver needs to be able to access directions and work orders to fulfill the job they’ve been scheduled to do. That’s why mobility should fundamentally be viewed and deployed contextually. That way, a worker isn’t hindered by a lack of technology and information, but also isn’t a danger to themselves and others.

The question of whether it is a utility employee's right to mobility on the job depends on their organization's mobile device policy, regardless of if it’s via a personal phone or tablet or a company device. But if that employer chooses to maximize mobility for its workforce, there is a safe way to keep devices in the hands of employees while also enforcing appropriate use.

A new model

Employers in the demanding field of electrical utilities need a better alternative to failed traditional approaches if they are to fully unlock the full benefits that mobile technology can bring to their workforce. Previously, employers might have worked with a paper-based system or enforced a mobile device policy that was completely cut off from the internet or banned any apps that were deemed personal. However, this establishes a lack of trust between employer and employee and ultimately creates more risks as workers work around technology instead of with it. These providers need a reliable system that will ensure workers are using their devices correctly and contextually to not only remain productive, but safe as well. This connotes managing device functionality based on a worker’s environment, from where they are and what they are doing, to the equipment they are using or working near, proximity to vehicular traffic when servicing transmission lines, or other conditions that influence the risk of their work.

The ideal device management strategy will provide access to exactly the right applications and functions at the right time, in the right place, to the right user. In practice, the way to put this degree of contextual access into practice, consistently, is with a technology platform. This gives an employer the ability to apply situational awareness to mobility usage by each employee by taking into account who is using the device, where, when and how. That contextualization is what we refer to as the human aspect of mobility, and as a worker’s environment changes throughout a shift, so too do their device permissions – automatically and in real-time.

In designing or selecting a platform, flexibility or dynamic responsiveness is an essential attribute. Workforce mobility is more effective when the acceptable use of a device and allowed contexts match the employee’s evolving situation throughout their day. And in addition to meeting the employee's nuanced mobile computing needs and privacy, the management platform must equally address and protect the company's network and data. Permissions must adjust dynamically to provide the functionality and flexibility workers need to do their jobs.

Situationally managed mobility

How will mobile devices ultimately serve workers and their employers? And how will business best practices and processes change to make the most of mobile technologies? We are only scratching the surface in these areas. Without a doubt, mobile devices will continue to push the enterprise forward in delivering a new model for the modern workforce, and that evolution has already advanced considerably. Utility providers cannot afford to ignore the opportunities that mobile technology has to offer or swim against the strengthening tide by denying their employees access to these advantages that have cemented their place in the daily life experience.

Electrical utilities will only bring advanced workforce mobility to life when they acknowledge that workers are dynamic rather than static, and then adapt their mobile device policies to uphold that principle. More and more organizations that choose to follow this path are adopting systems to manage mobile devices situationally, thinking about how mobility is used in the workplace and then handling those devices dynamically to provide access to exactly the right applications and functions for the task at hand. When a worker’s environment changes, so does what they can do on their mobile device.

This enlightened approach gives employers the improved ability to manage not just what’s being used and by whom, but also where and how, while still maintaining complete respect for employee privacy. This makes it easy to transform how mobile devices are used by the workforce and to do so in a way that increases productivity, rather than inhibits it.