For a recruitment consultancy such as SThree, opportunities to place candidates might come at any time of the day. Allowing employees to access emails out of office hours therefore has a direct impact on the business.
Surprisingly, however, the company has not in the past issued junior employees with mobile devices. “It would have been very expensive to do that,” explains Garry Lengthorn, director of IT services. SThree has a young employee base, many of whom have their own smartphone, says Lengthorn. “They’ve all got iPhones or Android devices,” he says.
Allowing employees to access their corporate email on their own devices presented itself as an affordable way to capture opportunities as they arise.
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However, SThree was especially eager to retain control over those emails, Lengthorn explains. “It’s easy [for employees] to go off and set up their own recruitment business, and access to data is a very sensitive subject for us,” he says.
This is why the company chose to support it’s BYOD programme with Good Technology’s mobile device management infrastructure. “We felt that with the containerised approach we could give staff everything they wanted, but if somebody left then we could turn off the activation, with no threat to us as an organisation.”
SThree deployed Good in December last year. The company integrated the Good back-end with its service management portal, from Hornbill, allowing employees to activate new phones or to wipe them if they were lost.
This process is far faster than commissioning or decommissioning BlackBerrys, Lengthorn reports, and the company is now in the process of “completely ditching” RIM’s once iconic device.
The BYOD scheme has now seen around 1,000 activations – just under 50% of SThree’s workforce. “That’s about as good as we could have expected,” says Lengthorn.
As for the impact of the scheme, Lengthorn says employees were reporting improved business volumes as soon as it was in place. “From very early on, we’ve had people saying: Last night I picked up an email –it was an opportunity to place some people in an organisation.”
For SThree, BYOD was not an indulgence for its employees, but a cost-effective and secure way to benefit from mobile working.
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