Employees Would Stop Using Personal Devices at Work If Asked: Study

A majority of employees use their personal mobile devices for work. But they wouldn’t if their company had an explicit policy against such personal devices in the workplace.

Those are just two of the findings of a recent survey conducted by Globo, a business software and service provider. The survey found that 68 percent of respondents claimed they use their personal mobile devices for work. Perhaps a boon for IT departments, however, 69 percent said they would not consider breaking their company’s bring-your-own-device policy even if they could get away with it.

These two findings highlight that BYOD usage is not all that important to employees, who leverage their personal devices largely because nobody has officially told them they could not.

Only 29 percent of those surveyed said their company had a BYOD policy, with 14 percent not even knowing if their firm has a BYOD policy.

“With the significant number of employees already using their personal devices for work, companies should be focused on creating a BYOD program and policies that fit the specific needs of the company,” said Aggelos Grypaios, vice president of business development and marketing at Globo. “Defining and managing a BYOD strategy that protects the security of the employee and the employer will keep companies competitive in the market by creating a mobile workforce.”

A recent study by Gartner (News - Alert) identified the security implications of BYOD to a business organization, and they include data leakage, privacy concerns, and employee access to unsecure sites that may bring in malware into the company network, according to the Unified Communications Strategies blog.

The Globo study found that 62 percent of respondents who bring their personal mobile devices to work use them primarily to check e-mail.

One easy way to keep employees from using their personal devices at work is opening them up to corporate IT departments. This much is obvious.

A full 93 percent of respondents said they would not take part in a BYOD initiative if IT had full access to employee’s personal information like e-mails and contacts, according to the study.

But there was not clarity if employers already had a policy that gave IT access to the personal devices they use for work; roughly 42 percent of respondents didn’t know if their company’s BYOD policy granted IT full access to any device used for work.

There’s generally some confusion over the BYOD policy.

Globo discovered that 91 percent of respondents do not know yet if their company has plans to implement a BYOD policy.

It is important to communicate the BYOD policy to employees and make sure that they understand their rights and the rights of the company, noted Grypaios.

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