In 7 onboarding tips to accelerate productivity, Adam Hansrod described how establishing a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy can eliminate the delays to productivity caused by new team members having to wait for company devices to be provisioned and delivered. 

A BYOD policy doesn’t just make it easier for people to do the work on their own devices; it also eliminates one of the biggest blockers to onboarding. On-demand onboarding is an enabler for organisations to convert an increase in delivery capacity to an increase in delivery throughput with minimal delay. 

What is BYOD policy?

A bring your own device (BYOD) policy means that members of the organisation bring their own electronic devices to work, instead of waiting for company-issued equipment. Staff and customers all working on their own devices are able to hit the ground running as soon as a project starts. Long lead times and much of the support needs created by traditional personal IT provisioning is removed.

Read more below about how two Equal Experts customers have been able to use the benefits of a BYOD policy to their advantage. 

An example of BYOD in the Public sector

We worked with a large public sector organisation on improving the experience that customers had when interacting with the UK government. This kind of fundamental, user-focused improvement required big changes in the way that staff worked. 

A reliance on historic processes and tooling would not enable change at the rate needed to realise the benefits for customers. Establishing a BYOD policy was fundamental to this transition. Traditional personal equipment policies had been designed to extend the perimeter security of data centres to staff devices, but with a shift to cloud hosting the definition of that perimeter became fuzzy.

Focussing on securing data and data access instead of the device itself allowed for BYOD policies that facilitated staff choice, so that people could use the devices that best suited their specific needs. In addition, contract staff could be onboarded at short notice, and for short periods of time, allowing them to provide the deep expertise that otherwise wouldn’t have been accessible. 

BYOD in the private sector

A large online and high street retailer already had an established BYOD policy; during the pandemic the benefits of its adaptive capacity proved itself again and again, allowing them to onboard additional capacity on-demand. 

Remote staff in nearshore and offshore locations were rapidly onboarded without requiring costly provisioning and shipping of devices around the globe, leading to a reduction in both cost, and the onboarding time required. This enabled business continuity and allowed the retailer to rapidly benefit from a wider pool of global talent.

Final thoughts

Establishing a BYOD policy enabled both organisations to benefit from the increased onboarding and offboarding speed. It also forced conversations and changes in information security policy that resulted in an ongoing capability to onboard on-demand. 

A quicker onboarding time has transformed into an organisational capability that allows for increased responsiveness to changes in context and an ability to take advantage of opportunities when they present.

For more onboarding tips you might also find the following useful: Making it easy for people to onboard