Employees have spent average of £500 on BYOD, claims European survey

It’s not so long ago that companies were looking to ban employees from using social media and their own phones during work hours, or at least introducing policies to make it a disciplinary issue. Oh, we can LOL about it now but at the time it was routinely compared to the smoking ban, forcing educated adults to huddle outside fire escapes for a quick Facebook fix while their old-school colleagues sat in the warmth, offline but manning the phones. Of course, all this was before firms worked out they could actually get employees to pay for their own stuff and save themselves the expense. All they had to do was label it BYOD and talk about empowerment and people would cheerfully fork out what turns out to be a reasonable amount of money so the firm doesn’t have to.

The latest survey to try to put a figure on what this all costs employees comes from software provider LANDESK which claims in (yet another) Workplace of the Future report  that over a third of the 3,000 workers surveyed in France, Germany and the UK buy their own work equipment and that it has cost them over £500 in the last five years for the privilege.

Over 80 percent of the firms surveyed now allow or encourage people to buy their own technology although obvious concerns remain. These are no longer about people wasting work time and catching cold on a step but security. Even so the report paints a mixed picture of what firms are doing to address security issues.  A surprisingly low 60 percent of organisations surveyed claim to  take responsibility for securing and licensing devices.