As mobile working becomes more popular and employees are increasingly interested in using their own devices, bring-your-own-device policies are taking hold in a growing number of companies. A recent report by U.K. communications service provider Azzurri Communications highlighted the productivity benefits offered through the use of BYOD initiatives.
"Ninety-three percent of participants experienced greater productivity through the use of mobile devices."
According to the Mobile Productivity Survey 2014, 93 percent of participants experienced greater productivity through the use of mobile devices and 47 percent described the increase as substantial. While most enterprises are currently focused on enabling their employees to have mobile access to critical data, a growing priority for many companies is to provide mobile devices with unified communications capabilities. UC is becoming more important for organizations looking to implement video conferencing and improve workflow management, both of which have been shown to increase worker productivity.
The survey found that employees most commonly use their mobile devices to check email, access business data and share files, and the majority - 62 percent - use their devices to both create and consume data.
"Smartphones and tablets have transformed mobile devices from being for consumption to being used for creation and editing – and so are changing the way we all work," said Azzurri Communications CTO Rufus Grig in an interview with ITProPortal. "The form factor shift toward devices with larger screens is enabling more meaningful work to be performed."
Tablets prove to be most popular enterprise device
A separate study recently released by Dell reiterated the productivity benefits of BYOD policies and found that tablets are becoming the most popular enterprise mobile device. According to the report, 90 percent of IT decision-makers offer tablets to their employees or have BYOD policies that support the devices.
The research showed that IT, sales and marketing departments are the biggest users of tablets in the U.S., with 93 percent of IT workers and 70 percent of those in sales and marketing using the devices. This is most likely due to the fact that those are roles in which the greatest amount of agility and flexibility is required.
The report also revealed that the majority of companies that use tablets in the U.S. do so to complement their use of laptops and smartphones.
"How people work is changing – the days of going to a specific place to conduct business are fewer while more employees are on the move and require access to company information outside of the workplace," said Neil Hand, vice president of Dell's tablet group.
According to the report, 81 percent of IT decision-makers believe the use of tablets provides increased productivity among employees. Most respondents estimated that the use of tablets raised productivity by at least 20 percent.
As enterprise adoption of BYOD and mobile policies continues to grow, service providers must be prepared to offer UC capabilities for a variety of devices, especially tablets. Organizations are realizing the productivity benefits of letting employees use the devices they are comfortable with, and the need for voice and messaging support to back up those initiatives will become increasingly important.