Rapheal John-Lall

Lo­cal busi­ness­es have been told to ac­cept the re­al­i­ty of the new mo­bile work­er who now ex­ists be­cause of how tech­nol­o­gy has changed the tra­di­tion­al work­place.

Richard Shep­herd, as­sis­tant vice pres­i­dent, Fi­nan­cial Ser­vices, at Guardian Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (GHL), de­scribed that evolv­ing work­er to a group of busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als yes­ter­day at a Mi­crosoft Trans­form, Lead, Grow 2015 Fo­rum at the Arthur Lok Jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, Mount Hope.

"The mod­ern work­er is the mo­bile work­er," he said. "That per­son is evolv­ing and be­com­ing more ubiq­ui­tous in our work en­vi­ron­ment. It is not just the ex­ec­u­tives or the agents, it is al­so the back of­fice work­ers who want to go home at nights.

"At Guardian Life, we have been do­ing things to over­come the chal­lenges of the de­mands of this new mo­bile work­er. We have about 2,500 em­ploy­ees and 40 per cent of those are mo­bile so that is a fair­ly large num­ber of mo­bile work­ers. We al­so have small satel­lite of­fices we have to man­age from time to time," he said.

Shep­herd said mo­bile work­ers had dif­fer­ent needs to tra­di­tion­al work­ers which must be met to achieve work­place pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

He said GHL was us­ing soft­ware like Mi­crosoft's Of­fice 365 to en­hance pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, mak­ing it eas­i­ly ac­ces­si­ble to their mo­bile work­force.

"We pi­lot­ed it about two years ago with about 300 peo­ple. We had a big mo­bile force out there that had ac­cess to it. Now we are mov­ing the rest of the or­gan­i­sa­tion to this pro­gramme. The ben­e­fit is that we have been able to launch a work­flow quick­ly."

He al­so said GHL has em­braced the changes tak­ing place in the work­place and urged oth­er com­pa­nies to do the same.

"This will en­able the mod­ern and mo­bile work­ers to work more ef­fi­cient­ly. Box­ing in em­ploy­ees will sim­ply make them more un­pro­duc­tive," he said.

The Mi­crosoft fo­rum, which was held in T&T for the first time yes­ter­day, fo­cused on how busi­ness­es can har­ness tech­nol­o­gy to de­liv­er flu­id cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ences, op­ti­mise net­work­ing, im­prove de­ci­sion-mak­ing, in­crease re­spon­sive­ness and re­duce cost, while en­sur­ing sen­si­tive da­ta is pro­tect­ed.