BYOD Strategy and the Gender Divide

For many companies, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has been used as a perk to lure top talent among millennials. The strategy has worked as programs that encompass BYOD give companies the reputation for being tech savvy, a criteria that half of millennials surveyed by CompTIA place high on their checklists on whether to take a job or not. But, is BYOD only for the under 30 crowd?

[[Related blog post: EMM, BYOD… The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be]]
According to a new study on the Internet of Things, a BYOD strategy may also be the enterprise benefit that will attract top female talent to a company’s ranks. The study finds that women are more enthusiastic about the future of IoT than their male counterparts. Of those surveyed, 83% of women will embrace connected living and actively use it in their lives. And, they’ll do so using their mobile devices.
As IoT is more broadly accepted and adopted into our everyday lives, women plan to use such connectivity to better organize their lives (40% of survey respondents) and help them to stop forgetting all the things they need to do (45%). In essence, women view IoT as a way to be more productive and help them better balance their work and home lives.
Mobile workforce programs like BYOD can go a long way to support employees – women as well as men – who are looking for ways to increase their productivity while more seamlessly integrating the demands of work and home.
Yet for such programs to make business sense, enterprises will need to strike a fine balance between a number of factors:
• Designing a mobility strategy that addresses existing issues and meets the enterprise’s unique requirements,
• Implementing policies around appropriate use, security expense management and more,
• Managing mobile expenses in a way that offers valuable insights on the effectiveness of usage policies, mobile plans and compliance, and
• Creating a positive user experience that puts the right devices, applications and support levels in the hands of the right users.
To achieve such a balance a deliberate enterprise mobility management process is needed, one that offers a structured approach to maximize productivity while minimizing risk and cost.