BYOD Backlash: 5 Reasons Employees Hate It And 5 Fixes For Your Company

May 2015:  If you think your employees don’t mind giving you control over their personal devices for business purposes, you’re kidding yourself. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) comes with huge privacy and mistrust issues … and research shows they’re getting worse. People identify with their devices so allowing even partial control can seem like a TSA pat down.

Your employees just want to do their work. Here are five things they hate most about BYOD and five things you can do about it:

Employees hate BYOD because of:

  1. GPS. They don’t want their bosses tracking their every movement.
  2. Logging. They don’t want their bosses tracking their app and Internet habits.
  3. Wiping. They don’t trust that there’s a wall between personal data and business data on their devices. In many situations, IT departments can wipe the entire device and not just the business part.
  4. 24/7 accessibility. Go away already, boss — it’s the weekend.
  5. Road blocks. The more security features, the more cumbersome the device and the less it feels like home.

So, rather than doing what companies want, employees are using workarounds. And since employees are choosing to not follow policies and procedures — and because new data shows millions of devices are not protected adequately anyway — BYOD adoption has slowed.

So what’s a company to do? Here are five options to consider:

  1. Give employees company-owned devices. This is a more realistic option now that many companies have gotten over the recession hump. Employees are less likely to complain about carrying two devices now and your IT department will breathe a sigh of relief.
  2. Use Mobile Security instead of mobile device management for BYOD. It gives your employees access to your network through an app, which is safer for you and offers your employees more control because they can delete and reinstall the app whenever they want. And the IT department can’t use it to wipe employees’ phones.
  3. Move to a device-agnostic platform. Collaborate and work on projects in the cloud using Office Online, Google Apps for Work or another secure cloud platform. While these platforms probably aren’t suitable for your entire business — don’t use them for anything that might violate compliance or security policies, for example — and require you to set up some restrictions, they’re super easy to use and don’t involve BYOD issues.
  4. Go VDI. Put your whole business on super-secure servers that your team can access from their own devices — since the data never leaves the server, it solves other challenges for certain businesses as well. Or go infrastructure-free VDI by choosing Desktop As A Service.
  5. Think portable. Consider moving to Docker, a next generation, open-source platform that’s based on flexible, portable app nodes or building blocks. It already has huge clients around the world.

None of these are quick fixes but they are solid solutions that can help keep your business data safe and everyone happy.

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