Smartphones may be every executive’s personal digital assistant. But, for most workers, phones are their life-line. Phones connect them to their immediate family, social world, and internet. Making room for smartphones in the workplace calls for some balancing of employer and employee rights – especially when you want to promote and engage social interaction through your HRIS potential.
Here’s the culture:
Pew Research Center reports key facts about usage as of 2013-2014:
- While 90% of Americans use cell phones, 64% use smartphones.
- Some 67% admit checking their phone for calls and emails even though their phones have not rung or vibrated.
- Of the users, 29% cannot “live without” their phone.
- 34% use their smartphones mostly to reach the internet.
- And, 7% – younger people, minorities, and lower-income owners – feel smartphone “dependent” for their personal, work, and internet communication.
Mobile devices were meant to facilitate communication including the ability to reach target markets. However, smartphones have liberated their holders to access needed and unneeded information 24/7.
A 2012 SHRM interview with Jeanne Meister of Future Workplace refers to a Deloitte survey of 3,000 business leaders: “only 18% [of respondents] believe social business is important to their organization today, but 63% say it will be important to them in the next three years.” The respondents were thinking about their intent to maximize the use of social media to manage talent, recruit, and train.
Here’s the problem.
As business leaders expect their employees to maximize their mobile interaction, it presents new challenges.
- Privacy: Employees have no reasonable right to privacy when using company-supplied phones. In general, employers cannot control or monitor employee-owned phones or their usage. Exceptions might occur where the use of electronic devices would compromise the work or safety. Under a firm policy on the use of personal smartphones at work, employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
- Hours: Businesses that expect employees to use cellphones for business purposes only have created a new set of problems:
* Businesses do not have to pay exempt employees for use of their smartphone off-duty.
* Businesses must pay non-exempt workers for off-duty work and work-related use of smartphones. - Addiction: Cellphone addiction is a demonstrated psychological problem for many users. They suffer anxiety, sleep loss, and reduced fitness as a result of dependence on their wireless access to social media, alerts, family management, shopping, entertainment, games – and work. Their dependence reduces the volume and quality of work.
- Abuse: Smartphones afford some secrecy for unacceptable workplace behaviors, such as sexting, harassment, and theft of intellectual property. In this litigation climate, businesses are accountable for what they know and “should reasonably have known.”
Integrate HRIS into the culture.
Today’s HRIS abilities encourage business owners to involve employees in their own personnel information, invite them to manage their benefits, to interact with their performance assessment, to read real-time corporate communication, to schedule and adjust their work, and to train and learn.
However, monitoring and managing approved, unapproved, and acceptable use of personal devices requires clear and consistent workplace smartphone policy:
- Ban all cell phone usage in certain work like food processing and research clean rooms.
- Brand employer owned phones with loud colors and logos.
- Require all phones to be on airplane mode during meetings.
- Limit use to ten minutes an hour or 20 minutes in four hours.
- Encourage users to keep their conversations civil and quiet.
- Prohibit bullying, obscene, and otherwise unacceptable language that can be overheard.
- Forbid any use of smartphone cameras.
- Clarify the “allowed” use as well as the “disallowed.”
You should create a direct and reliable means of emergency communication when phones are not permitted. And, it should be clear if there are different expectations of management use.
HRIS integrates with smartphones to afford employees a new voice, and removing or undercutting that voice is not the best practice. So, work with your business counsel and your HRIS provider to prepare and enforce a workplace smartphone policy that resolves any conflicts.
