Bring Your Own Device, known as BYOD, is becoming increasingly common in the workplace.
Colleagues may prefer to use their own mobile phone, laptop or tablet to the equipment provided by your company.
But is it a good idea?
The upsides are:
- Employee motivation and satisfaction – allowing your team to use their preferred choice of equipment shows you care about their opinions
- Increased efficiency – knowing the equipment well can bolster productivity
- Reduced costs – IT and telecoms are notoriously expensive and this can help to reduce your budget
However, there are a number of caveats:
- Responsibility for ownership and maintenance of the equipment is down to the individual person – not your business. So you cannot be sure how well maintained it will be, and you have less control.
- Security – you are still responsible for the control of sensitive information and can insist on password protection and encryption
- Monitoring – you can monitor your employees’ devices, but you need to be clear about why and when you are doing that, and discuss this with staff first.
- Loss or theft – we’ve all heard the stories on the national news about people leaving mobile devices with sensitive data on public transport. You need to decide how you will handle this, and put in place processes for potentially wiping data remotely, or tracking devices.
- Malware – you need to agree with your team about how devices will be protected to ensure viruses and malware are not inadvertently transferred onto your network. You can insist virus protection is used.
There is also the thorny issue of how you will tackle the management of data held on a device, when an employee leaves the company.
Allowing your team to use their own equipment is a great idea, but it is advisable to have a policy and supporting procedures in place to protect both the company and the employee.
If you would like help with setting up a BYOD policy for your business, please contact us on 01256 328 428.