So you’ve just launched your company’s BYOD program and employees are starting to bring their personal devices to work. How do you ensure compliance? In a word, communication!
Do Your BYOD Homework
Before you even launch your BYOD program, introduce your IT team to your marketing writer. IT needs to express your company’s BYOD rules and procedures to your writer. A good writer will be able to write your rules in understandable English; a mix of technical terms with a bit of charm. If your BYOD rules read like a technical document, no one will understand it. Remember – the people reading your BYOD rules don’t all come from the tech side of your company.
Distribute Your BYOD Rules
Now that you have your BYOD rules, it is time to distribute them. The rule of thumb here is – “the more, the better.” Hand out printed copies, email a digital version, mention it on Yammer and your internal social media with a link to your company’s BYOD page. Make it hard for employees not to run into your BYOD rules and procedures!
A BYOD Meeting
Written rules just aren’t enough when the stakes are this high. Organize a BYOD meeting at your company. Your IT team can do the presentation, but make sure they are good communicators. If not, pass it onto marketing. A boring reading of the rules is a waste of time. Start off with the good news – “Starting next week, you are welcome to work at home and here in the office on your personal devices! There are important rules for you to follow, but if we all work together, you will have more freedom than ever when it comes to your smartphones and tablets.”
Allow BYOD Confessions
Finally, the most important BYOD compliance tip. Expect your employees to make mistakes, especially during the initial launch of your program. Make it very clear to them that you are more interested in learning about their mistakes and problems than you are reprimanding them. It won’t do you any good if they hide things from your IT department. You need to know of any security holes and you won’t discover them without open lines of communication with your employees. If someone brings a device to work and is able to connect it to your office wifi without going through procedures and IT doesn’t detect it, you can’t afford to scare employees into not informing you. A bit of tolerance towards both IT and employees will go a long way.
Good communication is no less important than smart security in a successful BYOD program. Plan and implement your communication and you will do wonders for BYOD compliance!