By Lee Jonson
As a business owner, allowing your employees to use their personal smartphones for work purposes – a policy known as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) – theoretically makes sense. You get to save money on buying hardware – and, besides, how many people don’t already own smartphones these days?
However, according to one study highlighted by Samsung, smartphone usage boosts mobile workers’ productivity by 34%, helping to argue the case for business-owned mobility. Here are some other reasons why you might contemplate abandoning the BYOD approach.
Many of your employees could often be away from the premises
Some work roles require noticeably more mobility than others. For example, business development and sales personnel often need to be out of the office to meet up with customers and partners.
The Balance Small Business points out that executives also frequently travel on company business – potentially across the country or even the world. However, along the way, these executives must remain easily contactable – and, indeed, when they always have a mobile device at hand, they can be.
You can’t risk leaving your tech support employees in the lurch
If you have to send a technician to a clients’ home or workplace to help resolve a technical problem there, you can’t be certain that, at any point, they won’t need to call back to ask for expert guidance.
Furthermore, when they do call back, they will need to speedily reach just the right person – out of potentially hundreds of people under your wing – to avoid leaving the client waiting for too long.
You want staff to remain accessible outside office hours
In some lines of work, you can’t simply expect customers to only need your company’s services during the standard office hours. A heating engineer, for example, might sometimes need to be called out at awkward hours if a boiler breakdown leaves a customer without hot water upon which they heavily rely.
Fortunately, you need only provide your workers with company-owned devices – tied, naturally, to your company’s usually-advertised phone number – to switch your workforce to truly 24-hour operations.
A large proportion of your employee base works remotely
While the pandemic is one obvious reason why this could be the case, remote working was practical – and often even seen as desirable – before the COVID era.
A word of warning, however: working remotely does not always equate to working from home. So, if a particular employee of yours has taken a break from the home office, you could keep that worker in the loop by giving them enterprise-grade telecoms solutions like voice, data and mobile services by Gamma.
You can avoid running into HR problems
When you don’t own the devices your employees use, you could struggle to enforce how those devices are purposed in a work context. However, when you simply supply all of your workers with company-owned smartphones, you can more easily manage smartphone usage in the workplace.
As a result, you can also sidestep difficult questions about privacy, and draw a clearer line between employees’ home and work lives.
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