As IT departments strive hard to keep up with the rapid pace of technological advancements, employees on the other hand are increasingly favouring the concept of using their own devices for accessing business data. In fact, it is one of the trending concepts coined as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
BYOD encourages employees to work through their own devices and access key business data such as text documents, emails, etc. For businesses, it helps in reducing costs and improves productivity.
But like any other tech trend, it has its own share of pros and cons of BYOD at workplaces. This article is intended to throw light on both positive as well as negative aspects.
Merits of Bring Your Own Device
1. Saves cost: A business if adopts the BYOD concept saves a decent amount of money that would be otherwise spent on buying expensive devices to be given to employees for communication purposes.
2. Improved flexibility: Allowing your employees to bringing their own devices at work would improve workplace flexibility largely. For businesses that still rely on desktop computers and systems, BYOD would empower their employees to work from the remotest of areas with ease. Further, mobile workforce would no longer need to haul along numerous devices for work purposes, since they can easily lay their hands on the required data in one single device.
3. Improved productivity: Since employees will always have the devices handy with them be it at home or work, this would increase their availability and allow them to work seamlessly irrespective of the location. BYOD would eliminate the barriers between work and home enabling employees to have instant access to all the critical data leading to improved productivity.
4. Attracts new and potential talents: As it’s the era of millennials, who also dominate the workforce, a business practicing BYOD policy is sure to attract loads of potential talents. In fact, Bring Your Own Device can turn out to be an excellent USP for a company helping its HR leaders and business managers to hire and retain top talents.
Demerits of Bring Your Own Device
1. Privacy: Though most of the employees may find the concept of BYOD alluring, lot of them may get apprehensive when it comes to their own privacy. This is because the device that they will be using for work purposes is the same that they would be using for their personal chores such as for social media, personal communications, etc. This would raise concerns about privacy due to the fear that their companies can spy on them.
2. Data security: It could be the biggest worrying factor for a business. Allowing employees to use their devices for accessing company data could compromise the security of data at hand. It can threaten a company’s IT security putting all its sensitive and confidential data at risk.
3. Loss of data: As employees would use their own devices, companies would constantly fear about recovering or retrieving data in case the employee leaves or quit. This is the reason an increasing number of companies are turning to cloud HR solutions for storing critical data such as payroll information, as it allows instant recovery and quick access to data as and when required.
Takeaways
Businesses ought to realise that BYOD is a new offshoot and thus, IT experts and business leaders need to go back to basics to ensure having a robust security protocol in place before introducing the Bring Your Own Device concept. They should mull over the need of having the Bring Your Own Device concept and the data that can be accessed by the employees.
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Disclaimer: All the information, views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and their respective web sources and in no way reflect the principles, views or objectives of Pocket HRMS.
