Implementing a Robust BYOD Strategy can Save Significant Costs to Businesses
Having been around for nearly a decade, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is one concept which has divided the enterprise sector like nothing else has in a long while. On one hand, you have professionals and business leaders passionately lobbying in favour of allowing employees to bring personal devices to their workplaces, whilst on the other, there is an equally vociferous opposition to the practice’s widespread adoption due to possible security risks and compatibility issues. But as voices for and against BYOD implementation continue to discuss the possible benefits and drawbacks of such a move, those caught in the middle of this heated debate cannot help but wonder about the kind of benefits BYOD can unlock for businesses.
One of the most obvious benefits that implementing a BYOD strategy can bring in is the savings in resource acquisition costs. Since the cost of supporting a private device and a company-owned device is the same, business owners can significantly minimise their capital expenditure by allowing employees access to privileged information related to the company on their own laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This saving, however, is not immediately realised, as organisations often end up having to invest quite heavily into augmenting their infrastructural capacity. Security, device management, resource sharing, and compatibility are some of the key areas that organisations which follow a BYOD strategy at their workplaces end up bolstering to support employee devices.
So does that mean that there are no actual benefits of a BYOD-led approach in the modern workplace? The answer to that question is no. While the tangible cost-related benefits of BYOD might be cancelled out by the need for more infrastructural investments, the indirect benefits of allowing employees to bring their own devices to work are, in fact, quite significant. Allowing them to interact with business and personal applications on familiar devices, as and how they want to, gives them the freedom they often crave at workplaces. This not only increases loyalty and employee trust in the organisation, but also fosters greater job satisfaction.
The most considerable benefit of a BYOD approach, however, is the evident increase in employee productivity and work efficiency. According to BYOD Grows Up, a 2014 joint study conducted by ReadWrite and Intel, 74 percent of IT leaders believed that allowing employees to bring their personal devices to workplaces has a positive impact on their productivity. The assumption was corroborated by the results of an Intel BYOD test programme, which indicated that employees working on their personal devices can, on an average, recover 57 minutes every day. What this means is that, once the initial investments into beefing up network security and infrastructure are made, promoting a BYOD-driven work culture can generate significant returns on investments for businesses in India.
Digital technology, today, has become a part and parcel of our interlinked, always-connected lifestyles. Given its transformative impact on each and every aspect of our lives, it is but natural that technological solutions will redefine the very future of work. Industry studies estimate that nearly 75 percent of employees in India and other high-growth economies are already using their own devices at work. What remains, in this scenario is for organisations to fully integrate BYOD into their day-to-day operations and implement robust strategies to derive the maximum benefits from this technological intervention.
