A recent post on LinkedIn by a manager of a product documentation team announced that she was able to get her team good computers on which to work. A common complaint among non-developers in smaller IT companies is the almost step-motherly treatment writing teams get when it comes to access to hardware.
An aside: I have nothing against step-mothers. I have a step-grandmother and she showed me nothing but love. Now back to the article.
When looked at from the perspective of a company trying to stay profitable and improve gross margins, this lack of investment on, what can be considered, non-critical activities is understandable. The price one pays is alienating parts of the team that feel they are hard done by.
The solution to this problem could be the option to Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) to work. With the proliferation of mobile phones, a version of BYOD already exists in company culture today. Today, less than 15% of companies provide their employees with company-issued mobile phones. However, 82% allow employees to sign into work accounts from their personal phones. Extending this to include laptops and desktops is not unimaginable.
Here's how I think it would work:
BYOD allowance: This would be paid to the employee along with their salary. Some employees will buy cheaper machines to save some money. But I suspect most people will end up buying machines that are more powerful than they would need to do their work. For employees who cannot afford to buy a computer, companies can implement lease programs to help them procure a computer.
Preferred vendors: There is benefit to be had from buying computers in bulk. Employees buying individual machines would be more expensive. Companies can negotiate with vendors for better prices for their employees. One approach could be to empanel vendors with whom the company has already negotiated a standard discount on the label price. Interestingly, studies show that companies save over $300 per employee when they support BYOD.
Tighter IT policies: IT teams can apply tighter policies when a user signs into their system with their company ID. For instance, restrict storing all office-related work on the local disk. They must be saved to the organization's cloud. Most of this technology is already available and easy to set up.
The demand to be allowed to work from home and to work remotely is here to stay. Companies and teams trying to fight this are going to lose the war eventually. BYOD dovetails nicely into this scenario. With the proper IT policies in place, it is not hard to allow people to use their own devices while keeping company data secure. As cities get more crowded and commutes begin to take up as much time as a person spends in the office, companies have to find new ways to work. Imagine losing out on a perfect hire only because she isn't ready to spend four hours commuting to work. Similarly, employees spending twice the amount of time doing something on a slow machine is a waste of the most precious organization resource. While I haven't yet heard of anyone changing jobs just to get a better machine, the frustration of working on a bad machine just reinforces other frustrations.
Allowing employees to work on their own machines may not be the most pressing need at the moment, but it is one less thing to worry about in a scenario where there are so many worries already.
This article on Exploding Topics gives some interesting insights into the BYOD option.
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