Using Your Own PC At Work

There has been some publicity recently, on the BBC and in some IT-industry magazines, about companies which allow, or even positively encourage, their employees to use their own computing equipment at work. The reasons cited for this seem mainly to do with expectation: a generation of workers is rising which has known the laptop and smartphone since they were children, and which balk at being plonked in front of a beige box running XP while at work. Why, they reason, can’t I connect to the work network the way I do in Starbucks, and use whatever tools I use now to do my job ?

And some employers are letting them. The main downside for employers is that it requires an amount of work to make their networks both safe and compatible with this kind of use. Safe, so that employees’ equipment doesn’t spread viruses to the rest of the company, and so that they can’t take local copies of important data, for example. Compatible, so that they don’t let general computer use become more inefficient because of incompatibilities between systems and applications, as might easily be the case. Companies contemplating this should also have a relatively mature support organisation, whether this is internal or outsourced, to deal with the problems which will arise when new equipment is connected. This may cost more, as outsourced support costs generally drop for environments which are uniform, and rise with novelty.

So why should employers contemplate this ? It makes workers happier, it seems, as they can use facilities which are familiar to them and over which they feel they have some control. Some employers part-fund equipment for employees who wish to do this, arguing that it’s cheaper than the company paying for it all. And employees will often upgrade their equipment more often than the company might, avoiding those 20-minute waits for boot-up on a 4-year old laptop.

A more mixed blessing, though, is the intermingling of work and social life that might take place. Employees are probably more likely to work when they’re not at work, so to speak, as they also use their facilities for socialising, but they might also be socialising when they’re at work. Your organisation will need to manage this: work with your HR department to ensure that you are framing your staff’s goals by results, rather than simply by attendance. Work truly does need to be what you do, rather than where you do it, and this necessitates good management, good goal-setting, and a measure of trust in your employees.