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    Telecommuting and BYOD Will Grow Even Faster

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    Best Practices for Teleconferencing with Employees Working Remotely

    Change happens gradually, but, before you know it, what was a small trend or trickle is far better established. It will become the predominant way in which things are done or, at the least, one of a relatively few choices.

    That continuum comes to mind when reading a couple of stories – about telecommuting and bring your own device (BYOD) – that were posted in Baseline and Datamation, respectively, this week.

    The two topics are closely related, of course. In a general sense, they deal with the relationship between employee and employer. More specifically, somebody working at home is more likely to use their own equipment than those reporting to an office. Thus, BYOD is a big deal – the person only is “bringing” the device down the hall to the home office.

    Baseline’s story reports on the third annual Telework Week Report, which is authored by Cisco, the Mobile Work Exchange and Citrix Systems. The study points to a 91 percent increase in “pledges” to use telework this year over last. The greatest increase was in the Washington, D.C., area, where there was a 95 percent increase compared to last year. That alone, the story notes, reduced commuter trips by 392,420.

    The piece – which uses Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s negativity toward telecommuting as a counterpoint – essentially goes through the numbers. The conclusion is upbeat, at least from the perspective of telecommuting proponents:

    These gains, as well as cost savings for employers, are encouraging management to significantly expand telework programs, the Mobile Work Exchange reports. In 2011, about 60 percent of managers were receptive to the concept. Today, that figure has shot past 66 percent.

    Mayer has a partner in skepticism in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though an IDC study says the practice leads to growth. This is how The Wall Street Journal sums up IDC’s report:

    Businesses that allowed employees to work remotely at least three times a month were more likely to log revenue growth of at least 10% within the last 12 months, compared with firms without such policies.

    Of course, there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here: Are those gains due to the telecommuting itself, or are the firms likely to allow such an arrangement simply more progressive and therefore more likely to thrive? A good look at IDC’s research will probably go a long way toward answering that question.

    The Datamation piece on BYOD covers a Gartner study that said that almost half of organizations will adopt a “full scale” program by 2017 and, in doing so, “will no longer provide computing devices to employees.” The story is a compilation of the coverage of Gartner’s work at PCWorld, eWeek and V3. Together, the three sites recount Gartner’s results.

    It ends with an excerpt from the initial press release, which says that while BYOD is gaining traction across the board, it is most popular in midsize and large enterprises. The release also says that companies in the United States are twice as likely to implement BYOD as those in Europe. India, China and Brazil are the hottest areas for BYOD, the release says.

    So BYOD is the wave of the future – and the present. CMSWire points to five reasons that this is good news. They generally focus on employee empowerment and the fact that, if done correctly, it lightens the load on IT.

    Telecommuting and BYOD of course are two of the major trends of the past few years. It is clear that they are here to stay – and to grow.

     

    Carl Weinschenk
    Carl Weinschenk
    Carl Weinschenk Carl Weinschenk Carl Weinschenk is a long-time IT and telecom journalist. His coverage areas include the IoT, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence, drones, 3D printing LTE and 5G, SDN, NFV, net neutrality, municipal broadband, unified communications and business continuity/disaster recovery. Weinschenk has written about wireless and phone companies, cable operators and their vendor ecosystems. He also has written about alternative energy and runs a website, The Daily Music Break, as a hobby.

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