According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Pew (News - Alert) Internet & American Life project, there are roughly 53 million full-time American employees who own a smartphone. The number of employees bringing their own devices to work to use for both professional and personal use is growing, as more companies implement bring (your own device BYOD) policies and embrace the dominance of mobile devices today.
A recent report, “BYOD Insights 2013: A Cisco (News - Alert) partner network study,” found that 90 percent of American workers are using their own smartphones for work, but 40 percent don’t password protect their smartphones and 51 percent connect to unsecured wireless networks on their smartphone. The report analyzed 1,000 responses of full-time American workers.
The study pointed out that managers, IT workers and CIOs have been interviewed and analyzed about BYOD, while no one has really dug deeper into the everyday employees on how they use their smartphones for work.
The shift to BYOD validates this idea of an “always-on” employee; the study found that 70 percent of employees who use their smartphones for work are expected to read e-mails after working hours.
“Employers aren’t exactly rushing to compensate workers for tossing their smartphones onto the pile of capital,” the study said. Ninety percent of Americans who use their smartphones for work don’t receive any sort of stipend or allowance to pay for a smartphone, even if they use it for work. Only 6 percent of workers say their employers paid for their smartphone outright, 3 percent receive a stipend and 11 percent report receiving any kind of small reimbursement for their smartphone devices.
Industry Breakdown: Who’s Using BYOD the Most?
The study found that company size and industry play a big part in whether employees participate in BYOD. For example, smaller firms tend to expect workers to answer e-mails after hours more often than large enterprises and are less likely to reimburse or offer stipends for smartphones.
The eight common industries seeing BYOD are banking, education, food service/hospitality, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, retail/wholesale and technology. Seventy percent of workers in the banking industry use their smartphones for work every day and 95.2 percent of education employees use their smartphones for work purposes.
Healthcare, legal and banking sectors come with greater expectations of privacy and security. However, only a little more than half of employees using their smartphones for work in these industries protect their smartphones with a password. Fifty-nine percent of healthcare employees, 64 percent of legal employees and 67 percent of banking employees password protect their phones, which are all relatively close to the national average of 60 percent.
“Password protection is a relatively simple practice to enforce when companies requisition and secure their own fleet of devices. It clearly gets harder when its employees’ own smartphones. Forty percent of work devices without passwords is untenable,” the report said.
There are similar results for accessing unsecured or unknown Wi-Fi networks. Fifty-three percent of healthcare employees, 64 percent of legal employees and 60 percent of banking employees access these unsecured networks, with a national average of 50 percent.
Knowing employee smartphone habits can help companies prevent security breakdowns and extra costs. To download and read the full report, click here.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli