Bringing your own device, or providing it for someone else?
When I touched upon bring-your-own-device schemes in an article about upgrading devices last month, my inner industrial relations consultant was a little troubled by the whole idea of bring-your-own-device: why would I provide equipment for my employer's use at my own expense? I then read Brian M. Gaff's column BYOD? OMG! in the February 2015 issue of IEEE Computer (pp. 10-11), in which he provides some advice for employers in managing devices brought into the workplace by employees.
In doing so, Gaff sometimes makes said employees sound very much indeed like suckers providing free equipment to their employers and donating time outside of work hours: BYOD transfers costs from employers to employees, and increases productivity (per dollar, if not per time) by allowing employees to work at home. Reading that "personally owned devices are typically more advanced compared to those that are employer issued" (p. 10), I further envisaged a workplace version of John Kenneth Galbraith's "private opulence and public squalor" in which BYOD participants flaunt their cool new devices while the workplace's own infrastructure is left to rot.
To be fair, there are benefits in it for employees as well. They get to use devices set up to their own specifications, and there's some convenience in not having to switch between personal devices and work ones. I myself frequently answer work e-mail from my home computer (though that says as much about the casual nature of my employment as anything to do with which computer I like to use.) Maybe one could even make an environmental case for the practice insofar as it reduces the number of devices that need to be built (though the perpetual upgrade cycle that feeds BYOD enthusiasm may have exactly the opposite effect.)
Apparently pretty much everyone thinks this is all more than fair, because a quick search for "bring your own device" on both Google and Bing fails to bring up anyone complaining about employers transferring costs to employees. Indeed, if Gaff, Google and Bing are to be believed, employers can barely stop employees from bringing their beloved devices to work.
Still, it's not clear to me whether BYOD enthusiasts have consciously rejected any concern over who pays for work to be done, or if they have in fact forgotten to ask the question in their rush to use a favourite device. Even I wouldn't reject BYOD outright over the concern I've noted above — but I would want to be sure that I'm not just providing technology procurement services as a free add-on to my normal duties.
