Managing the Mobile Lifestyle and BYOD Office

The traditional office or work environment has now expanded to include an off-site culture of home-based, traveling, and remote workers. Staff in many cases are located in various regions across the globe.

Smartphones and mobile computing devices have contributed to making this possible, together with advances in internet connectivity, and telecommunications technologies like VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) trunking, and cloud-hosted PBX (private branch exchange) systems.

Workers may now be fully reliant on mobile devices, and using their own hardware under Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, at work.

This situation brings challenges – both in terms of lifestyle, and to management and the enterprise. Here are some tips, for making life easier.

Set Boundaries With Your Time

From a lifestyle perspective, it’s important to establish recognized working hours, and to set aside a portion of each day for personal matters, family, friends, leisure, and exercise. This helps in preserving your essential work / life balance.

On a hosted PBX system with integrated messaging, you can reinforce these boundaries by deciding when and how calls, messages, and emails can reach you directly, be transferred to another number, or other options.

Set Boundaries For Your Data

VoIP telecommunications and hosted PBX systems for business come with an in-built segregation of personal and company data.  For the enterprise, this preserves the integrity of sensitive operational and customer information, and protects intellectual property.  For mobile workers, having separate Inboxes and account credentials for Domestic and Business helps to safeguard personal privacy, and in maintaining that work / life balance.

Use Presence And Collaboration Tools, To Stay In Touch

Another feature of modern digital communication is the use of presence: Tools and services that can register your status and activity throughout the day, and the status of your colleagues. This is helpful in determining who’s available at what times, to take phone calls, troubleshoot issues, and so on.

VoIP telephony and Unified Communications (UC) features like video conferencing, chat, Instant Messaging, whiteboards and collaboration platforms help to enable workers who are physically and geographically separated from each other to share information and contribute to group projects.

Use Mobile Device Management (MDM) And Security Policies

For business units, senior managers, network administrators, and security officers, an MDM solution and strong corporate policies make it easier to keep track of company data held on personal devices, and on how users are accessing systems and enterprise resources.

Business VoIP providers like net2phone can assist and advise in selecting, implementing, and (for managed security services) even running these systems.

Mobile Device Management usually includes options for remotely suspending user accounts and wiping data held on registered devices, so…

Keep Regular Backups Of Everything

If you’re afraid of losing your device or having an over-zealous network administrator hit the “Kill” switch on you, it’s a good idea to keep regular backups of your important information. This can be done by transferring personal data to another device, a personal hard drive, or to a storage account in the cloud.

Note that you shouldn’t be doing this with company data. There will usually be approved procedures for data backups spelled out in your employer’s security, BYOD, or Mobile Device Management policies.

If you’d like to know more about BYOD, managing the mobile lifestyle, or managing mobile devices, contact the experts at net2phone.