No time to lose

Mobile Working

For much of his working day, Peter Phillips is a man in a van,but he hardly conforms to the oafish stereotype. He is sharp-suited and has a DSA trained driver, tapping at a laptop and sat on leather upholstery.

Phillips is managing director of Phillips Presentation Products (www.phillipspp.com), a 40-person family firm in Perivale, west London, that manufactures promotional products such as ring binders and packaging - including the red books for This Is Your Life.

Like many owner-managers, Phillips's customers are becoming more demanding and want meetings arranged at the drop of a hat. By early last year, his day was degenerating into a series of car journeys from client to client, interspersed with manic sessions at his office desk and evenings catching up with paperwork.

Then a friend who runs a Mercedes dealership told Phillips he needed a mobile office, and lent him a Mercedes V Class people carrier to prove his point. Suddenly, after expensive conversion to encorporate technology facilities, Phillips's life was transformed. Instead of wasting time and energy piloting his own XJS, he found he could work in the Merc until the moment the driver drew up outside a client's office.

"It's increased the amount of customer contact," says Phillips. "Reaction times are all-important in this business. If a client phones up, I can say I'll come straight down".

Sometimes the client comes too. "I took a client out on Thursday," says Phillips. "We wanted to look at some product displays in shops, so we spent four hours travelling, having a meeting as we went. You can't do that when you're driving, you lose eye contact."

Phillips, who works about a 50 hour week, spends five or six hours a day in the vehicle - not just going to meetings, but also on the two-hour commute from his home in Amersham, Bucks.

Phillips soon found the layout and equipment of the standard vehicle inconvenient, so he had it converted, spending about £17,000 on top of the £28,000 purchase price. He now has a functional desk between two facing sets of seats, with a combined printer/copier/scanner and a fax machine. Extra lighting and power points re-create the facilities of a bricks and mortar office - not forgetting the fridge, in case Phillips or his passengers feel peckish.

Voice communications are provided by three mobile phones - two hands-free kits for Phillips and his passengers, plus one for the driver, who also has a TrafficMaster in-car navigation system. Data links are handled by a Nokia Card Phone, enabling Phillips's laptop computer to send and receive data at up to 28.8kps.

All the communications are Orange-based, and Phillips particularly likes Orange's fast data access. In all, there are seven aerials on the roof of the vehicle - for TV, radio, fax, data and the three phones.

I can vouch for the quality of the telephone link. When Phillips and I spoke, the Merc was bowling along the M4, but there was no fluctuation or background noise - thanks partly to the extra sound insulation installed.

Mobile e-mail allows Phillips to remain as contactable on the road as he is in the office. After a client meeting, he can e-mail figures, quotations and specifications back to base and the paperwork is processed and ready to sign when he arrives. Incoming e-mail inquiries can be forwarded to the office for instant response.

Phillips was nervous about working out of the office but now finds it more productive than his terrestrial desk. "It gives me a lot more thinking time and the quality of the work I do when out and about is higher," he says.

His own experience of remote working has encouraged Phillips to offer similar flexibility to his staff. E-mail inquiries go to a former staffer who now works part-time from home. "It's a good way to retain people's experience," says Phillips. And the firm's new sales co-ordinator works three days a week in the office and two at home.

Phillips was so taken with mobile working that this year he set up www.mobileoffices.co.uk to promote it. He is currently building his fleet of vehicles for hire puropses to like minded executives throughout the UK.

Phillips is one of a growing breed of business people who work on the hoof for at least part of the time. According to research by London based consultancy Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA), the average office desk is only occupied for 45% of "normal" working hours - meetings, client visits, trade shows, training courses, holiday and sickness account for the rest.

This has led to innovations such as "hot desking" - a smaller pool of desks to be used by anybody, rather than giving people a desk each - as well as increased use of serviced and temporary accommodation, mobile technology and provision of office facilities at people's homes.

Part of the secret is good technology, says Wes McGregor, a director of AWA. "You need to be contactable and you need to be able to access data from wherever you are in transit," he says.

But it is equally important to explain new working practices to staff and get their support. Staff may feel undervalued if their personal desk is taken away. Managers must be reeducated to interact differently with often absent staff and switch from management by attendance (do people turn up on time?) to management by results (what do they achieve?).

Properly managed, however, mobile working can be beneficial. As Phillips says: "It frees up time and you can decide how you spend it."

Paul Bray