PrintFor Dominick Arrigo, it started with puzzling cost overruns on network installation projects and questions about the uneven productivity of his field service technicians. “We researched it and found them not showing up on-site on time, or not being there at all,” says Arrigo, an operations manager with ComNet, a 300-person computer networking company in Bethel, Conn.
So a year ago Arrigo equipped his field service reps with GPS-enabled cell phones and began using a service that tracks and reports each worker’s location in real time. The result, he says, has been improved productivity, better cost control, and improved customer service. As Arrigo puts it, “There’s an advantage to knowing guys are where they’re supposed to be.”
Arrigo has plenty of company. Xora Inc., which provides ComNet’s GPS Time Track service, works with more than 16,000 customers averaging 10 to 15 mobile workers each, says Ananth Rani, vice president and cofounder of the Mountain View, Calif., company.
Small firms were the first to use GPS Time Track when Xora introduced it eight years ago, Rani says. Now larger companies are signing up, including some with up to 5,000 mobile workers.
Still, the market for management-targeted offerings like Xora’s lags far behind consumer-oriented location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. These services use location-finding tools to help consumers connect with each other and businesses connect with consumers, but they have not been widely used to manage mobile workers.
Location-based management packs far more potential punch than simply knowing where friends congregate for the evening, however. Arrigo set up alerts to tell him when an employee doesn’t show up to an appointment on time, and he has reduced overtime and response time by routing the nearest workers to job sites. And after a GPS-enabled phone and other equipment were stolen from a company vehicle, ComNet was able to direct police to the thief’s location and recover some of the gear.
The service doesn’t come free, but at $20 a month per mobile worker -- plus GPS-enabled phone and cell phone service -- it’s no major outlay either. Arrigo feels the service has paid for itself in the year ComNet has used it.
Getting Employees Onboard
Cost isn’t the only issue for companies considering employee-tracking technology. At least two states -- Delaware and Connecticut -- require employers to notify employees when using GPS tracking, says Bennet D. Alsher, an employment attorney at Atlanta’s Ford & Harrison law firm. And if your workforce is unionized, he adds, location tracking will certainly be a bargaining chip in contract negotiations.
Tracking employees may seem like a great problem-solver for managers and business owners, but it often doesn’t appeal to employees. Arrigo says employee resistance was one of the initial obstacles to GPS tracking at ComNet. He overcame that with the help of employees who welcomed the opportunity to show that they were performing as asked.
Business ethics professor John Boatright of Loyola University in Chicago says employers can help their case by offering solid business reasons for tracking. “An employer has a legitimate interest in knowing whether employees are working as directed,” Boatright says. “If an employee is told to go to New York and ends up in Philly, that’s a problem.”
But workers also have, in Boatright’s opinion, the right to know who will be looking at their GPS coordinates. Likewise, they'll want to know what information about them has been gathered, and they'll want a chance to check it and, if necessary, correct or dispute it. Employers should have processes to address those concerns, he says.
An employee’s right to privacy presents another potentially problematic area, Alsher warns. Notifying employees before implementing location tracking will solve many potential privacy issues, however. He suggests adding a sentence in the employee handbook about tracking, similar to the ones many companies already use to let employees know e-mail will be monitored.
At ComNet, some of the 150 field service employees were concerned about who would see the GPS data. The company set up protocols so that only a few people could view all the data. Other supervisors could see data only for employees reporting to them.
One obvious privacy concern is whether employees will be tracked when off duty. The answer should be no, according to legal and ethical experts. To simplify the issue, Xora’s GPS Time Track service can automatically shut off when an employee’s shift ends or during scheduled breaks.
Moving Forward with Location-Based Services
Expect to see more location-based management in the future. Rani says the explosion in GPS-enabled phones means that more companies will find it practical to track employees. He’s now seeing tracking applied to white-collar salespeople and other mobile workers, such as home health-care aides. If nothing else, it helps with figuring mileage for expense reports, he says. Phones with accelerometers can determine a vehicle’s speed, alerting employers to unsafe driving and opening up the possibility of insurance discounts, he adds.
For ComNet, the future is likely to bring more use of GPS-enabled management technology. Arrigo has integrated the system with payroll, trimming paperwork, and is investigating using more advanced mobile devices to, for instance, allow customers to digitally sign work orders. “We [signed up for the service] because of abuses,” he says, “but there’s a lot of benefit that has come from it besides that.”
Mark Henricks writes about business, technology, personal finance, and other topics from Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, The Washington Post, and other leading publications.
