The acronym BYOD stands for ‘bring your own device’. It refers to the practice of letting staff use their own personal computers in a professional context. It’s a relatively new approach, but one that has become more feasible with the popularisation of tablet computers and smartphones, and the near ubiquity of wireless broadband.
There are many benefits to letting staff work in your business using their own devices. It allows for greater flexibility, lowers the cost of hardware, and can improve morale and help productivity.
“It’s one extra thing that companies can have in their arsenal as far as keeping their staff happy,” says Mike McHugh, solutions consulting manager at Adobe. “Tech-savvy people aren’t going to be happy in their position if they’re forced to use a corporate supply-type laptop or desktop computer. They’re happy with their own device; they can use and install whatever they like on it. It certainly makes for a happier employee.”
As with any new workplace practice that promises to change your business for the better, there are a few potential obstacles and difficulties associated with BYOD that are worth understanding before you consider allowing it in your business.
Cost saving
The most obvious benefit of a BYOD office is that it lets the business save on hardware. Instead of purchasing a computer for each new employee to work on, staff members are given the choice to bring their own, often in exchange for a modest additional allowance.
When public relations firm Handle Communications went through a period of growth, owner Jules Brooke decided to invest in some workstations to accommodate new staff members. The company has since downsized and become a BYOD office, and Brooke identifies the accompanying cost saving as one of the major resulting benefits.
“We bought a whole lot of computers that had become very out of date,” she says. “[BYOD] alleviates you from having to pay capital expenses and the small tax breaks that you get for purchasing new computers, which then have no value. Once you’ve bought it and then started using, computers are worth pretty much nothing.”
The business now keeps all client information in a cloud-based software called SugarSync. Employees can access and modify this data from their own machines, from wherever they can connect to the internet. The software co-ordinates changes across all staff members’ devices, saving the need to keep crucial data on a remotely accessible in-house server.
Productivity and flexibility
The benefits of having a BYOD policy extend beyond saving the business money. Giving staff the option to use their own hardware is a stepping stone to giving them the flexibility to work where they’d like to – be it from their living room at home or from the office kitchen.
“For some organisations, the employers use it as an attraction and retention strategy, to create that flexibility in the workplace,” says Anne-Marie Orrock, managing director of Corporate Canary HR Consulting. “They feel as though they’re being listened to, their importance is being considered, and they’re able to have that flexibility.”
While it certainly facilitates a degree of flexibility, a BYOD policy also encourages staff to work with tools that they’re most comfortable with.
“If they’ve always used Macs, in moving to a new job where they’ve got to use a Windows-based computer, there can be a process of acclimatisation,” says Heather Cox, marketing manager at application service provider Apps.com.au. “If they can bring their own equipment, it cuts down on the orientation time, and they can work the way they’re comfortable working, which usually means they’re going to be more efficient.”
While there are correlations between happiness and productivity, the introduction of personal computers can also bring distractions. Erik Bigalk, creative director at Smart Solutions PR, noticed that staff productivity became slightly more erratic following the introduction of a BYOD policy in his business. He puts it down to the presence of social media on staff members’ personal machines.
“Because people are on their own machine, they get their Facebook messages and updates and whatever else,” he says. “There seems to be a general loss of productivity everywhere, but because people seem to be much happier working on their own machine, they seem to be also very happy to curb that habit.”
Instead of reverting back to an office-only hardware approach, Bigalk set out a ‘no interruptions’ policy that encouraged staff to faze out all distractions – both those sitting on their desktop, and those directly pertaining to their professional role – when they were working towards a particular goal.
“Unless it’s really important, we don’t bother them, because it’ll take them out of what they’re doing,” he says. “Then an hour later they can check emails and social media again. That seems to have worked really well.”
Compatibility and IT support
Compatibility is one issue that can arise from having multiple device types in an office. This can range from something as fundamental as differing file structures between computer operating systems, to incompatibility between different editions of a software that’s crucial to the operation of the business.
One solution to this problem is to find hosted software; software that’s hosted as a service on the internet, and is designed to be used irrespective of the user’s chosen device. This not only allows staff to work from wherever they can connect to the internet, thereby further facilitating the possibility of remote work, but can help to solve, or at least reduce, compatibility issues.
While there are clear benefits to running an office in which employees use their own devices, it can impose new challenges for whoever manages the company’s IT.
“The big downside is where you’re trying to change over to a BYOD from a controlled environment,” says Apps.com.au’s Cox.
She relates that Apps has seen instances in which employees who are accustomed to using their own devices have been hired by companies with strict IT policies.
“The company wants this employee, so they make this concession without looking too far into it,” she says. “Then you have the problem of expectations about what they can do with their own piece of hardware, and what they can’t.”
In these instances, explains Cox, the employee often assumes they have complete control of their device, which makes the task of providing them with IT support more complex.
“They have to be allowed to take it home and use it on their home network because it’s theirs,” she says. “So they change IP addresses and gateways and things in the back end, and then they bring it back to work and it doesn’t work.”
This introduces the potential for your company’s IT-savvy staff member to become the employee’s proxy home network support contact, as well.
“You start getting dragged into these conversations like ‘it was working at the office but now it’s not working at home’,” continues Cox. “It makes the jobs of the IT support so much harder, because now they’re not supporting one network, they’re supporting that one network and the other networks used by all the people who have these devices that they take home.”
Maintenance
While a BYOD office allows for greater flexibility and the possibility of improved productivity, it also raises questions around who is responsible for the upkeep of the hardware used.
“The one thing that you’d also have to be aware of is the maintenance and support of those devices,” says Adobe’s McHugh. “There should be policies in place of what you support and what you don’t support.”
It’s important that any policies drawn up outline whether the employer or the employee is responsible for the upkeep of the employee’s hardware.
“That way, if there’s anything going wrong with the hardware, it’s not the company’s IT department that are running around trying to fix it up – it’s done by the manufacturer,” says Corporate Canary’s Orrock. “Therefore, they’re saving on the cost of time and productivity. The IT department can be focusing their attention on more strategic and productive issues, rather than reactive issues.”
Security
While security is only a major issue for a BYOD office if staff members are permitted to work remotely, it’s nevertheless important to revise security practices to account for it.
“The biggest concerns I have around this are around security,” says Rick Ness, chief technology officer for Australia and New Zealand at Thomson Reuters. “A mobile device, by its very nature, is much more prone to being lost or stolen, with sensitive information on there.
“One of the things that Thomson Reuters has been very careful about is that we supply proper security policies to any of these mobile devices that people want to connect internally,” he continues. “Things like making sure it’s password protected, that we have the ability to wipe these devices as we feel needed.”
Legal implications
In addition to security, it’s important to consider how a BYOD office changes the legal obligations of an employer to an employee and vice versa.
“Most of the time, these policies are coming out of an IT department, and they don’t always consider the legal implications,” says Corporate Canary’s Orrock. “What it starts to do from an employment perspective is blur the line between contractor and employee.”
For example, Orrock explains that if a court ever needs to classify whether a staff member is a contractor or an employee, one of the questions used to determine this is whether the employer provides the employee’s work tools.
“Bringing in the BYOD policies weakens that test and blurs it,” says Orrock.
“There’s also different implications for the employee themselves in terms of income tax, depending on whether they’re using it at home or BYOD in the office, or whether they work at home and it’s being used at home,” she continues. “They’re the kind of things they need to be aware of and think about, as to who’s going to be where and who the cost is going to hit: the employer or the employee.”
Another point of concern is whether you encourage staff to use their own software, and how this could impact your business legally.
“If you have staff using cracked software, and they’re working in your company doing work on it or whatever, is the person liable or the company liable for that?” asks Adobe’s McHugh.
Does it suit your business?
Apps.com.au’s Cox suggests that a BYOD office might be better suited to a new business than to an established business.
“As a startup, you’ve got the ability to really overhaul the system – you can either start from scratch, or you’re pretty close to it. You’ve got the ability to put the policies in place,” she says. “You’re not trying to force a BYOD policy into an existing IT policy where it’s just going to blow things out of the water.”
Regardless of whether your business is new or long-established, it’s best not to impose a BYOD policy on staff that don’t want it or aren’t ready for it.
“Does it suit everybody in that small business or not?” asks Orrock. “Usually a push towards BYOD comes from employees who are very technically savvy – they know how to configure their own system. You may have employees that are not as technically savvy, so they don’t know how to manage this whole thing themselves. I think at the moment, it will stay what you call ‘voluntary policy’. It’s too early for small business to make it a mandatory thing, because it’s just not going to work with all employees who are not up to speed with it.”
Orrock suggests that the best approach in the long-term is to not settle on and enforce a fixed policy, as it’s likely the needs of the business and its employees will change in the long term.
“The key there is to just review it consistently every 12 months,” she says. “If you’re going to have a policy like that, you can’t let it lie on the shelf and get dusty.”
Image credit: Thinkstock
Correction: Quotes attributed to Anne-Marie Orrock were originally incorrectly attributed to Anne-Marie Cross.
