BYOD Users Work Longer and Earlier

Are your employees more productive using their own smartphone or tablet as part of a BYOD program? This seems to be one of the trickier questions in the mobile in the enterprise debate.

Sure, employees enjoy the convenience of carrying one phone rather than a corporate phone and a personal phone. Conventional wisdom also says a BYOD policy makes an employee more accessible after-hours, over weekends and during vacations.

“If you’re mobilizing all these processes, aren’t you by default getting extra hours of free work out of people? The answer is, sure,” James Gordon, senior vice president of IT at Needham Bank, told CIO.com.

Such BYOD productivity boosts, however, are hard to quantify — that is, until now.

[Related: Why One CIO Is Saying ‘No’ to BYOD ]

According to a BMC Software survey, the average BYOD-carrying employee works an extra two hours and sends 20 more emails every day. One out of three BYOD employees checks work email before the official start of their work day, between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m.

Three out of four IT managers claim, “BYOD is a big productivity boost.”

Two Sides of BYOD

To be fair, not everyone is sold on BYOD’s productivity claims. A recent CompTIA survey of 400 IT and business executives found that less than half of companies offering BYOD feel it contributes to employees’ productivity. CompTIA also reports that a majority of the biggest companies surveyed is not doing BYOD at all.

In stark contrast, BMC Software’s research shows a whopping 95 percent of companies permit some form of BYOD. Moreover, 84 percent provide minimal support, and 74 percent offer no security education. Taken together, these stats show a lot of companies at risk with BYOD.

Check out BMC Software’s infographic:

Courtesy of BMC Software