Because of the convenience and the potential increase in productivity, bring your own device policies are ideal for staff and management alike. As an employer, you want to make things easy for the people who work for you, but you also want to get the best work out of them. Sometimes, giving them freedom is the key, but if you choose to let them bring their own mobile devices to work, you still need to institute a few BYOD commandments.
- Employees Shall Register Their Devices
Employers used to know exactly what tools their employees used. Since everyone now has a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, that’s no longer the case. To protect yourself, your clients, your assets, and your staff, you need to know what everyone uses for their work tasks. Ask your employees to register the devices they use for and at work. You can go one step further and maintain that management needs to approve each device. A device that isn’t adequately protected, for example, might put your company at risk.
- Employees Must Create Complex Passwords
On their own devices, especially mobile phones and tablets that they use daily, people are often lax about their passwords. A simple “rover123” won’t suffice if company data passes through a phone or tablet. Require your staff to create complicated passwords with combinations of numbers, lowercase and capital letters, and even symbols. Remind them that they need to change their passwords regularly. It’s not a bad idea to ask that employees incorporate an extra layer of security if it’s available on their devices, such as fingerprint scanning.
- Employees Shall Not Share Devices
It’s not over the top to ask employees to keep their devices to themselves, either. Once they take on the responsibility of using their own devices for professional purposes, they must further assume the responsibility of keeping their work-related information secure. Using a shared phone, laptop or tablet for work is unacceptable. People who aren’t employees of the company shouldn’t have access to sensitive information. Even a child, playing on a smartphone, could accidentally erase critical information or contact a client.
- Employees Shall Follow Rules on Work Time
Those rules are up to the employer. Typically, however, employees have to stay off of restricted apps and websites – the same ones they’re usually told to avoid on their work computers. Social media sites, games, and other apps waste time and energy. Time theft is, of course, a form of stealing from the company, so it’s understandable for management to discourage it at all costs.
Other businesses go a bit further. For instance, you might ask your employees to avoid using their device’s cameras or microphones whenever they’re on company property. The main point is that you don’t want private information getting out to the public. Recording footage at the workplace can also cause problems by making the business liable in all sorts of scenarios. You never want to put anyone’s privacy rights at risk.
- Employers Shall Cover the Phone Plan
Again, this is up to you, but since using a device for work increases data usage, carrier fees, and other costs, many businesses work out some kind of deal with their employees. You could research a phone model that works for your business and then offer to put the staff on an employee plan that includes a new phone, such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus from T-Mobile. This allows you to choose the data plan and know that your employees are on a secure, reliable network. Another option is to subsidize some of the cost of your employees’ current plans.
- Employers Shall Wipe Phones Under Legitimate Circumstances
Using a device for personal and professional tasks comes with certain responsibilities. If an employee breaches the rules, then employers have every reason to wipe the device. In your BYOD policy, you should also stipulate that management can purge the device if an employee resigns, gets fired, or loses the device. This may cause staff to ask about external storage, which comes with its own set of rules. Ultimately, it’s up to you to allow or disallow it, but always demand that any additional storage is safely encrypted.
For a BYOD policy to work, you have to trust your employees, and they have to trust you. Creating a guideline of rules and regulations will help immensely. Is there anything else you’d ask of your staff?
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