BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, has become a popular method of dealing with the unavailability of money within small businesses. Many employers have gone from discouraging electronic use to actually asking their employees to bring smartphones, laptops, and tablets to the workplace. Because this is a relatively new practice, there are a couple of things you should know about BYOD.

A Few Benefits of BYOD

One of the most obvious benefits of making employees bring their own devices is a savings in both training and capital expenses. Furthermore, if employees decide they do want to participate is the your BYOD program, you can compensate them in other ways, such as rewarding them with flexible hours and benefits that would cost you less than a company device would. There is also less worry about overhead and the preservation of company-owned devices, and letting your employees use whichever applications they want to use is also important.

A Few Negatives of BYOD

Though employees using their own devices can save you huge amounts of money, it can also cause you a bit of grief. Not everyone at the workplace is going to buy the same tablet, phone, or laptop computer. You’ll be unable to standardize operating systems, hardware, or even applications. If your business requires that one computer integrates with other computers, BYOD will make it difficult.

One of the biggest concerns is security. Unless you require a special program to be installed and used on every employee-owned device, you are risking a great loss by not having universal security. Many devices on the market don’t have built-in bullet-proof security technology, and you don’t know where else your employee may be taking his or her device and using it on an unsecured network.

BYOD is up to each and every individual employer, and if the problems can be managed, allowing employees to bring their own devices can save your business a tremendous amount of time and money.

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