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• How Current is Your HR Technology Policy For Employees Part II The Cell Phone Policy

How Current is Your HR Technology Policy For Employees Part II The Cell Phone Policy

written on July 29, 2010 by Laura Pettit Rusick

When is the last time you updated your HR policy’s technology section?  Does it include Social Networking?  Cell Phone Usage?  Work from Home?

In Part II of this series, we discuss cell phone policies.  How can such a ubiquitous item create such interesting challenges?  In many organizations, the cell phone has become as critical as a computer.  Do you struggle with usage and administration?

There are two schools of thought.  First, employees buy their own cell phones and receive an allowance based on their job type.  The allowance may include voice usage, text usage, data usage and/or wireless card usage.

Benefits:
• It minimizes company costs (e.g. no phone costs) and increases cost predictability.
• Reimbursement standards are fairly simple to implement.
• Monitoring is not required for personal usage.  Anything above the allowance is automatically the employee’s responsibility.
• There is no time spent on overall contract administration.
• Even the best-rated carrier may not work in the employee’s home or favorite vacation spot.  By giving the employee options, he can contract with the carrier best in his particular area.

Challenges:
• It is difficult to enforce standards (cell phones and carriers).  The help desk ends up supporting multiple protocols for synchronizing mail, calendar and contacts which is time consuming.
• The help desk has to refer employees back to the cell phone carrier for problems requiring carrier intervention, as the employee has the contract for the phone.
• From a security perspective, not all phones support best practices.

These include: 
Remotely “wiping” – or removing – all the data on a cell phone when it is lost or stolen. If it doesn’t, the risk of exposing sensitive information on the phone – particularly if passwords are kept and auto-filled on the phone for corporate system access – is much higher. 

Enforcing a password on the phone. If you don’t, anyone can walk up to the phone and view confidential emails. 

Encrypting the data on the phone.

• Employees are incented to sign up with lower rate carriers even if that carrier gives a lower level of reception and service.
 If you choose this option, define the category of phone required by job class.  For example, IT people that are on call must have smartphones.  Each year, define the new phones that will be supported.  For example, it could be any Blackberry or Droid but no Windows Mobile or iPhones.  This criteria would be based on technical capabilities, staff experience and known issues, both from a functionality and a security standpoint.

The second common cell phone program has your company purchasing cell plans and phones.  Standards are typically created for cell phone minutes, text usage, data usage and wireless card usage based on job categories.

Benefits:
• From an IT perspective, phone standards can be enforced.  Phones that support a direct connection to your email server (e.g. Microsoft Exchange) often support the above best practices.  Support charges are lower due to consistency, and phone issues can be addressed with the carrier due to the overall contract leverage.
• With one overall phone contract, discounted rates are much more likely.
• Some corporations pay the extra fee for Blackberry service which can support email outside the corporate environment and provide a level of disaster recovery for email.
• Because of a larger contract with the cell phone carrier, the carrier will often offer employee discounts, giving you a free benefit for your employees.

Challenges
• Administration is more cumbersome.  With a corporate agreement, you are administering a contract and need to deal with the negotiation, terms, issues, etc. that go along with it.
• Determining the acceptable level of personal use of corporate cell phones can be contentious.  Do you review detailed bills for personal calls?  How does the accounting (or IT) area know which calls are personal?  If you require the bill to be under $100 as an example, how do you charge back the employee for overages?
• Most employees dislike changing cell phone numbers and dislike carrying two cell phones.  Having gone through the process of moving my cell phone number to the corporate account and then converting it back later, I can tell you it’s a time consuming and drawn out process.  Would I do it again?  Unlikely.

Think through the benefits and challenges of each scenario, and prioritize your corporate needs.  Does flexibility, cost or lower administration win out?  Regardless, do require users to have a password.  Strongly consider requirements for remote “wiping” and encryption of cell phones.  We wish you the best on this critical communications component of your business that rarely makes everyone happy!

 

Copyright © 2010 by Laura Pettit Rusick
Laura Pettit Rusick assists CEOs at small and mid-sized organizations with strategic technology planning and management. Her company, OPT Solutions, helps them enable growth, reduce costs and increase productivity by optimizing business processes and technology. For those interested in benefiting from business process efficiency projects, sign up to receive the PDF “Ten Critical Success Factors for Optimizing Business Processes”. Laura’s website is http://www.optsolutionsinc.com .