Should You Provide Your Staff with Smartphones?

Featured article by Calvin Page, IT Specialist

Smartphones have been around for years now, with the first gen iPhone that started the revolution now all the way back in 2007. Just about every business now reaps the benefits of being able to communicate with customers through the new means that smartphones made possible, like custom apps, and the fact that thanks to their phones, most people are now online all the time and readily checking things like Twitter, Facebook and their email.

Encouraging Staff to Use Smartphones for Work

Of course, to truly leverage the advantages of the smartphone revolution as a business, all of your staff need to be embracing the way you want to use these devices to promote better productivity, greater ease of communication, and more flexible customer outreach. This can be done as part of your general company culture, or by implementing certain tools that everybody uses within the company from their phones, such as custom business apps that tie in to your own internal databases (for example for things like customer record management), or just simply messaging, scheduling and collaboration tools you all adopt.

Of course, a big question that will affect how easily you can do this is whether or not you issue your staff with company smartphones, or ask them to use their own with your systems.

The Advantages of Issuing Smartphones

Often, the easiest option is to simply choose a type of smartphone – for example an iPhone – and issue one to everybody within the business you believe should have a company smartphone. This can be fairly cost effective as corporate plans for buying and using phones take advantage of economies of scale, and you won’t have the admin overhead of people all individually charging for certain work related call expenses or app purchases on expenses. It is also relatively secure – while services like Unlocking Smart may allow people to unlock their work phones and use them as personal phones, most staff have absolutely no reason to tamper with the phone you give them to use, and you can cover the devices with your insurance.

You can have each phone set up exactly as you want it to be, with all of the tools you care about your team having, and you won’t have to worry about compatibility – you can always be sure something you’d like to implement will work with all of your team’s devices, unlike if they are using a mixture of different phone operating systems.

You’ll also benefit from everybody having a dedicated ‘work’ phone number – people often prefer this as they can turn off their work communications when they are having some downtime without having to miss any personal messages or calls.

Disadvantages

The only real disadvantage to issuing phones is that some people may not like the idea of having to carry a work as well as personal phone around with them, or may not like the type of phone you ask them to use (if they are serious Android or iOS fans and you give them the alternative). In general though, these complaints are rare, and most people will never strongly object to using a work device.

There are several compelling reasons to consider giving your staff, or at least senior or mobile staff, similar smartphone handsets to use for work on the go.