If your business has people who spend their day out of the office, their phone is their office. It is the laptop, the scanner, the signature pad, the radio, and the timesheet. Get it right and productivity goes up. Get it wrong and you lose days to faff.
Start with the device, not the apps
Most field teams we work with have the wrong phone. A £200 budget Android is £200 badly spent if the screen is unreadable in sunlight, the battery does not last a day, and the camera scans barcodes poorly.
For field staff, pay up. A modern iPhone SE, a Pixel 8a or a Samsung A55 is £400 to £700 and will last three years. The daily productivity gain pays for it in a fortnight.
Ruggedised handsets (the CAT phones, Samsung XCover range) are worth it for actual construction and warehouse staff. For delivery drivers and sales, a standard phone in a £30 case is usually the right answer.
Get MDM on day one
Microsoft Intune, or an equivalent MDM, should enrol the device before the user touches it. The payoff: app deployment without user faff, security policies enforced, wipe on lost or stolen, and compliance reporting.
For BYOD (staff using their own phones), run Intune in “app protection” mode rather than full device enrolment. It containerises work data without touching personal photos. Users accept it, HR approves it.
The apps that genuinely matter
Outlook and Teams. Obviously. But configure them properly: enable single sign-on, enforce app PIN, disable copy-paste out of Outlook for sensitive mailboxes.
A decent notes and task tool. OneNote works. Microsoft To Do works. So does Todoist or Things. Pick one, standardise, train.
Document scanning. Office Lens, Adobe Scan or the built-in iOS scanner. A field tech who can photograph a meter reading and have it in the CRM in 30 seconds is saving an hour a day.
Offline-capable apps. Field staff hit dead zones. Apps that gracefully handle offline (cache, queue, sync when reconnected) matter. Apps that throw a white screen when the signal drops do not.
A stock scanner. The built-in camera barcode readers are now as good as £400 rugged scanners were a decade ago. Use them.
What not to bother with
Custom corporate launcher apps. Nobody uses them, they break on OS upgrades, and they are a maintenance tax.
Shared devices. If two staff share a phone, productivity is halved. Give everyone their own.
Disabling all consumer apps. Beyond a baseline (no gambling, no adult content, no TikTok on the work device if you care), policing is hopeless. Focus the policy on data protection, not usage minutiae.
A pragmatic policy
Three rules. One: all devices enrolled in Intune, no exceptions. Two: no customer data outside sanctioned apps, enforced with app protection. Three: lost phones reported within two hours and wiped within one hour of that.
Put that in a joiner pack, in plain English. Get the user to sign it. Done.
We enrol a thousand mobile devices a year in Intune and run the my.plan portal on top. If your field team is wasting time with the wrong setup, the fix is usually a week of work and a couple of handset swaps.