Pitfalls of using your personal phone for work

May 31st, 2011

If you’re like a lot of people, you got an iPhone or some other smart phone to make your life easier, and to let you chat, text, email, and surf the Internet on-the-go. We all love our technology, but should we separate our personal and work phones? Experts say you should think twice before using your personal smart phone for work. Sure, it’d be nice if your company paid your phone bill, but there are a lot of potential pitfalls to using your personal smart phone for work.

• For one thing, your employer basically assumes control of your phone if they’re paying even part of the bill, which means, they can prevent you from having certain apps, images, or content on your phone.
• Also, companies in medical or financial industries have to work hard to protect customer privacy. So you might only be able to view your work emails and attachments on your phone, but not be able to answer them, move them, forward them, or download them to a computer.
• Smart phone bills can be pretty pricey, and if your company pays a flat monthly fee to cover your costs – and you exceed it, even for business reasons - you may get stuck paying any overage.
• If your company is paying the bill, you could get reprimanded or fired for texting or sending emails that the company deems inappropriate, like one California SWAT sergeant, who was disciplined for sending racy text messages to his wife and his mistress via his government-issued phone.
• Finally: What happens if your phone is lost or stolen, or if you quit or get fired? A lot of companies would automatically wipe your phone’s memory to delete sensitive work documents and emails, which means they’d be deleting all your personal information, too.

ChannelPro-SMB: A recent Forrester report found that among people who don't currently use a Smartphone for work, the interest is extremely high to do so. Are businesses supporting or planning to support personal devices?

Ted Schadler:” It's a mixed bag. Smaller companies are much more likely to support employees using their own devices than big companies are. When it comes to personal mobile devices [smaller companies are more likely to say] sure, bring it in--we'll load email on it, and if you're willing to pay for it, so much the better.”

ChannelPro-SMB: What's the upside to supporting personal devices?

Schadler: The primary benefit is the ability to work from anywhere. What that means practically is you're not waiting for someone to get back to their desk to get an answer to a question. We asked, "Why do you use a Smartphone to run a work application instead of a computer?" For the employee, [the answers were]: "I can run the application from any location." That's number one. "My computer is at work but I can run the application away from the office." "I need to run the app while commuting to/from work." And "I spend time at customer sites where I can't use my computer for this application." Those are the top four--those are all big benefits. And the thing about these Smartphone’s is they don't require a lot of support because they're not very complicated. [For email,] you've got to turn on access to your inbox, which requires a little bit of knowledge, but not much.