A recently released study from Cellcontrol shows that, when it comes to enforcing policies on distracted driving and similar cell phone policies, most companies are biting off far more than they can chew, and only five percent of all Fortune 500 firms are even able to enforce the policies they mandate on their mobile workforce.

At least, not in their current states. The Cellcontrol study, conducted over the course of one year, showed that only that slim number of firms had purchased monitoring technology that would allow them to find out if employees were using their phones while driving. And as the Cellcontrol study further revealed, it's not just phones that are at issue, as employees are also managing to find ways to use laptops and tablets while driving as well.

While many firms have established policies around the use of mobile devices while driving company-owned vehicles—especially in the face of potentially disastrous legal actions taken against those that cause accidents while doing so with judgments in the multiple millions of dollars—the ability of companies to actually ensure that these policies are being followed is somewhat lacking by comparison.

It's not too much of a surprise, really, that Cellcontrol would not only undertake a study like this, but would also discover results like these, especially given that Cellcontrol's primary stock in trade is a monitoring service that can be used to ensure employee compliance with these programs. Further, following the study, Cellcontrol's Senior Vice President, Chuck Cox (News - Alert), came out with remarks applauding corporate America's “understanding the need to have a corporate policy in place regarding the use of mobile devices by employees,” but at the same time scolding them for not “protect(ing) the brand from liability against a rogue employee using their cell phone while operating a vehicle.”

Indeed, it's important to have a policy in place around the use of mobile devices and driving. For the sake of human life, as well as the protection of the entire company from liability issues, it's a downright necessity. Though Cellcontrol's conclusion that monitoring technology is, by extension, just as necessary isn't quite so clear. Perhaps most of those Fortune 500 firms trust their employees to do the right thing, or simply aren't interested in babysitting employees trusted to be mobile in the first place.

While distracted driving is a problem that needs to be prevented, the lack of monitoring software to do the job doesn't seem to be quite as necessary, a conclusion that 95 percent of Fortune 500 firms seem to have reached on their own.