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Using Employee-Owned Technology in the Workplace?
digitalvengeance asks: "As of Monday, my company is initiating a 'no cell phone' policy at all of our offices, including the IT department, where I work. I consider my cellular phone a necessity both in my personal and work lives. I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem. I am considering refusing to take work calls or text messages on my personal cell phone, and even quitting in protest of the new policy. How have other Slashdot readers dealt with policies regarding use of employee-owned technology at work? Any suggestions as to how I can get this policy overturned without looking like someone who wants to spend my working time on my cell rather than coding?"
If they stonewall and ignore your concerns, then by all means, raise a stink. In the interests of civility, job security, and conservation of energy, though, you may want to try the easy way first. Don't break out the elephant gun before you've tried the flyswatter...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Have them pay for an alpha pager and move your alerts there. Really, quitting over the use of a device you've become addicted to is not the smartest reason to terminate employment.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
...or is it "you can't bring a cell phone to work"?
You might be able to get a waiver for the former... the latter seems like a misguided attempt at a security policy, perhaps?
The Army reading list
First of all, when in Rome...
.02,
Second, while I don't technically agree w/the policy I don't really see why you are complaining. You do as they say w/o too many questions. If you don't like the working conditions you find another place that is more towards your liking.
I would normally go on to rant about how I personally dislike cell phones in public (nevermind the workplace) but it's irrelevant for this discussion. You do what the employer wants or you start sending out the resumes. A cell phone isn't exactly something required to sustain life.
Just my
If they won't let you use your own phone get them to provide you with a company phone. After all if you are using it for business then they should be paying for it.
If you use your cell for work as much as you say you do, and you are not alone, then the impact of this new policy will be felt.
Do what they tell you to do, don't use your cell at work.
On the flip side of it: If you truly do use your cell for work, then get them to spring for it ( monthly costs and all ). It's only fair.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
then they should pay for it. Plain and simple. My office has no idea I have a cell phone number. They know I have a phone, but they are not gonna get the number unless I see part of the bill being paid by them.
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Seems pretty obvious to me: ignore their silly rules, set your phone on vibrate and go about your business.
Quit over this? What, are they going to fire you if you check an occasional text message on your (silent) cell phone?
Some rules are made to be broken, not fought.
It's unclear whether you are saying that the company won't allow cell phones to be used or won't be supplying them. An outright banning cell phone from the workplace is extreme and should be met with a quick move to another company. To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
Let's assume that's not the case and they just won't be providing you a cell phone. Your job is to keep systems running. If you fail to keep them running you will be seen as not doing your job. Any excuses about the company not providing a cell phone will be seen as petty.
So, I would ask if the company is going to reimburse business calls on your cell phones. If they aren't, you should ask them where notification should be sent and that your cell phone is unacceptable. They may tell you to have notifications sent to your supervisor. If so, do it and get on with life. Don't feel obligated to leave your cell phone on all the time - besides I think it sucks the life force out of you to be reachable all the time. This makes your supervisor responsible for responding to notifications. A few weeks of your supervisor getting the notifications and not being able to reach you during movies, etc. and the policy will probably change.
If they are going to reimburse expenses, leave it as is and make sure you get the expense reports in every month. Do the expense reports on company time and make sure that the time spent that way is clearly noted on any status reports. Once they realize that they're spending $10/month on cell service for you and $50/month for you to itemize the statement and another 10/month to process the expense reports, the may get smart and change the policy.
In short, follow the rules but make them follow the rules as well (i.e. That you won't accept un-reimbursed business expenses.) See this.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
Have they detailed why?
Often it helps to know the exact reason before blowing up and making a stink over it. It also means you can approach them for a exemption and know what not to say when trying to justify it.
Area51 - We are watching...
I have found that in this situation, outlining a business case with real world cost benefit analysis of several options helps the management types with an agenda see the light of day without losing face.
:
Outline in a business case that you are keen to meet company pollicies, but as you are no longer able to utilise your mobile phone for the work purposes you outlined, you require
a) a pager and company cell phone or equavalent to maintain the current levels of service;
b) a company provided other doo-hickey remote support solution (fill in the blanks here);or
c) special expemption to utilise your personal cell phone, with an allowance to reimburse you for the relevant quiantity of your monthly bill.
For each of the options, outline the costs versus the benefits to the company, and make a reccomendation on the preferred options for the company, and outline why.
I have found this approach works wonders with managers.
You don't need a personal cell phone at work. IF these server notices are important to work, then the employer can provide you with either a telephone or text pager or blackberry... and if they don't want to do that, then you are no longer on the hook for notices you couldn't receive
if you family needs to reach you at work, they can call in through the usual office lines, like everyone always did in the time before we all had cell phones in our pockets.
i really don't see the problem here.
No joke. I could post for pages and pages with antecdotal evidence, from my own experience and that of fellow geeks, that the quickest way to eliminate a policy or new set of particularly stupid regulations is to follow them to the letter. For instance:
POINTY-HAIRED BOSS: Why didn't you know that Server X, Application Y, and Cubicle Drone Z were all hosed and not responding to requests?
YOU: Well, sir, I get these notifications, see, and when I'm working in another part of the office or not sitting right at my desk, I know instantly if something goes wrong with anything that I'm responsible for and then I can fix it.
PHB: But...that doesn't explain why you didn't know about XYZ!!
YOU: Well, these alerts all come on my cell phone, you see, and since it's company policy that Cells Are Not Allowed...
The dumber it is, the more religiously you should follow it, and make darned sure that all of your buddies fall in line with the company's new direction as well. I'm assuming, of course, that you've already presented your case to a supervisor or HR person or something, and that you're not a Super Executive VP of Something. If you're at that level in the organization, just say "no" and have your department behave differently from everyone else...apparently this works in the real world if you're high enough on the food chain.
"Linux doesn't exist. Everyone knows Linux is an unlicensed version of Unix"- Kieren O'Shaughnessy
Seriously. Why do you need a cell phone? Do you have a phone on your desk at work so that people at work can get a hold of you that way? Do you have email?
I'm trying to think of why you might need to use your cell phone at work, and these are what I could come up with:
1) Communicate with other people in the organization or company. If this is the case, then the company should provide a phone for that purpose. Obviously the company you work for does not think a cell phone is necessary to do the work they hired you to do. They could be wrong, but that's what they think. If so, either convince them they're wrong, if they really are, or use the tools and processes they want you to use for communication.
2) To communicate with vendors or other 3rd parties. If so, then the company should provide you with a phone, but it doesn't have to be a cell phone.
3) Personal calls. It's actually better for the company to make a phone available for personal calls. Many little errands can be done over the phone that you would otherwise have to take time off for work to handle and it is invariably more efficient to use the phone. It may be in an inconvenient location, but they aren't obligated to make it convenient for you. And if they don't provide a phone for personal calls to take care of personal items, then you either take a couple of hours off from work to run errands, figure out another way to handle the errand, or quit over it. Quitting seems excessive.
4) You mention server alerts. Are you attempting to manager either personal servers or servers you've set up for a side business on company time? If so, why should they permit that? Many companies even have specific rules against moonlighting because they know the drain two jobs can have on a person. Switch to email alerts and have the mail sent to an account you can check at work. Then if they see that you're doing a second job on their time, they can deal with that as appropriate.
Do they provide you with a phone at your desk or nearby? Seriously, a cell phone is not a necessity.
It's amazing how many people are pointing out that the company has a right to do this and in the end the employee can only put up or leave.
Yes, we know. Move on, nothing to see here.
Taken to its basic components, any relationship is one where any entity can do whatever it is they want to do and the other entity can decide whether or not they want to put up with it based on some sort of cost/benefit analysis. This works in *both* directions -- Some of my users (salespeople with eight-digit sales per year) pretty much have a 'get out of jail for free' card at work.
But relationships are not just "put up with it or leave." The company presumably has an interest in you working for them because otherwise, well, they wouldn't employ you (ignoring the possibility they're doing this as a way to persuade people to quit so they can outsource them to India without severance pay or unemployment benefit hit). In the end, relationships where each party does the very minimal required of them sort of suck both on the personal and professional levels.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that you want your relationship with your company to have some flexibility in it, and in order for it to have flexibility in one side, it needs to have flexibility in the other side also. So if you're getting work phone calls on your personal cell, it's perfectly reasonable to say "look, I'm bending here and using my cell phone for work purposes and that's OK -- would you bend a little and let me keep it?" If, on the other hand, they absolutely refuse to be flexible, then absolutely you're under no obligation to be flexible yourself -- if they don't allow you a personal cellphone, then don't allow them to use that cellphone to contact you.
Companies that don't want your personal life intruding into their business shouldn't intrude with business into your personal life. Now, mind you, that's a perfectly reasonable and rational approach to which the company may respond with "tough, we can replace you with an Indian for $5/hr. Want to see who blinks first?" That's something you have to deal with and figure out how far you're willing to go.
and commodities don't have a right to complain. Commodities are supposed to happily participate in the market and flow to wherever there is demand. If I buy a car, it doesn't complain that I didn't pay enough for it, or that I'm relocating it to a different state. The same goes for workers, if one loses their job, no problem, just move to India, where there is apparently greater demand. My car wouldn't complain about having to go to India, so why should I? Why should it be any different when dealing with workers? They're just commodities, they have no rights.
This is of course what market fundamentalism is about. It's about relegating worker's rights to the scrap heap, not even recognizing them, and putting the rights of property owners first. And, as commodities, we aren't supposed to complain, we're supposed to simply go somewhere else if we don't like the conditions, and let the invisible hand work it's magic. And, when there is nowhere else to go, we're supposed to shut up, like any other commodity would. The one crucial fact that you are overlooking is that people are not commodities.
Yeah - it is a stupid policy, the other thing is depending on company culture can you just sit down with your (hopefully) sane manager and say what it is used for and ask to get a waiver from the policy (I worked at a company that had really weird rules, that first line managers could ignore if they didn't apply to their workers).
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Did you ever ask why the policy was instituted. Companies that are governed by the SEC and engage in stock or fund trading are required to have all employee communications monitorable. This way if they suspect someone of giving insider information they have records of the phone calls and emails. Use of personal cell phones make it hard for them to comply with the SEC.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
I agree. I see so many posts saying something to the effect of: "Stop bringing it, they'll see how important it is when servers go down because nobody got the pages". Wow, what's happened to our work force? Here are a few ideas that might actually look like you give a shit. It sounds like we're stuck in a "Clerks" version of IT!
1.> Have a little frigging back-bone, people. state the issue to your boss in an e-mail. Document it. Be sure to be detailed on the risks.
2.> Contact HR explain the above.
3.> If the above doesn't work (as American AC in Paris has also suggested the 1st two). Contact internal customers who have jobs running on the impacted systems. Explain the situation and the risks.
4.> Be willing to help develop either a more defined policy (i.e. no private calls, no digital cameras) or accept an alternative (alpha-pager).
5.> At the first issue of an outage because no-one got notified, bring this up. Don't wait for all hell to break loose.
Following these steps with the right tone, enthusiasm, and tact, you'll at worst look like you actually care about your job and the company you work for. Unless maybe, you prefer to live on welfare, unemployment, and bitch about how the internet stock bubble saturated the job market with IT guys. Be a "stand-up geek" and do the right thing.
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www.fairtax.org
...a teaching hospital (fairly large one at that) actually has a few masts on its roof. It's bullshit that modern phones muck up hospital equipment. This was not the case 10-15 years ago when phones transmitted at a higher power and hospital equipment was less advanced than it is now.
I am NaN
I think the real risk of the interference is low, but it would actually be funny if it looked like everyone on the floor flatlined at once, as someone walks by talking on their cell phone.
Sounds like a Management problem. As in the employees are not being managed. Treating employees like children only works on the immature and the stupid. Everyone else gets annoyed, and (eventually) leaves.
There's no constitutional right to having a cellphone at work.
There is no Constitutional right to sick time off, either. Would you want a "pity parade" if your job suddenly cut sick time because a few people were abusing the system?
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I had an incident where one employee left a cell phone at their desk, it rang (one of those really annoying music rings) on and off for nearly an hour. Another employee (next cube over) turned it off. The first employee went ballistic about that. That was fun. Once in a while I'll have an employee who just spends wayyy too much time talking on their cell phone. Lovely to deal with that as well.
The reason companies never wanted people making personal calls at work was not the cost of the (mostly local) calls, but the cost of their NONPRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEES. When employees have cell phones (as most do now), they feel much more justified in sitting around on the phone since the "cost" is theirs. People who know not to spend hours on personal calls on their desk phones seem to have no compunction about doing the same thing on their cell phones.
So what's the solution? In my experience, the RATIONAL answer is to speak to each person when you feel that they've crossed a line, and make a decision suited to the problem. In my experience, the rational answer will get you reamed. Employees who care so little about their responsibilities to their work and to their co-workers tend also to have no compunction about arguing "disparate treatment" (as though cell-phone users are a protected minority). We are forced to make inane blanket policies that hurt the decent employees who probably ARE contributing their personal cell minutes to the company, in order to stop the bad behavior of a few. I've been told by HR that I cannot tell ONE employee to "leave the cell phone in your car" I must make the rule for EVERY employee in the department (not that I have, I'd rather lose the productivity of the lamer employees than disgruntle the better ones).
Anyway, there are two sides to every story.
~
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." -Emerson
1. You have no specific right to be able to use your personal phone in the work place, period. Arguing about personal rights sounds good, but you're on company time, company money and company resources. Sorry. Your employer has the liberty to restrict anything that comes into the work place. If you need to receive emergency or other sorts of calls, that's what your manager can do. If you need to make personal calls: that's called on your lunch break. In practice, most work places allow use of business phones / communication services for "reasonable" personal use: just don't abuse it is the usual rule.
... "necessary for my job function": it smelled very badly that she just wanted to chat at work, and the helpdesk ticket was rejected. You don't want to look like this girl: you need to put forward a professional case.
2. If you need the cell phone for your duties: then you should have it funded by the company. If it's not absolutely necessary for your work, there's not much you can do about claiming that denying it to you undermines your employment contract (this argument can work in some countries). In the case of your sort of work, I don't think you could argue that it's absolutely necessary to do your job, but in reality, it's probably making you a more effective employee. If they are short sighted about this: try to change their attitude, or find a new and smarter work place. That's life.
3. Because of your job function, there's probably a good argument that a cell phone adds enough value so that your role should be an exception to the general rule. Either the exception is that they allow you to use your own phone for work purposes, or they fund it for use in business purposes only. If you want to make your argument for this: you need to present a bottom line oriented business case: just _exactly_ how does the cell phone actually concretely contribute to making you a more effective employee and how does it contribute to the bottom line: some examples and so on would help. Again, if they aren't convinced by this (and they're not obliged to), then tough for you: find a new workplace. When you go to the interview for the new workplace, check out these details to see whether it's the kind of place you want to work.
I once saw a helpdesk ticket from someone asking for "MSN Messenger" installation for "communication with people in israel"
I'm a sysadmin at a mostly-mac scientific institute. Some of the labs allow scientists to bring in personal laptops, and we have many windows laptops that are personally owned. I understand the problem, and how these scientists need their own computers, but it is nothing but a pain for us because their computers aren't patched, aren't virus-scanned, etc, and when they bring them home to work on their dsl lines, these scientists end up bringing an infected computer in which spreads to all the windows-only instrument computers. Thus, I will be the last person to condone personally-owned equipment-it provides nothing but headaches to our department.
I'm really amazed at the number of "why do you need one?" posts. Sorry, but yours is one of the more pedantic and supportive of totalitarian work rules.
We also don't "need" computers, the internet, cars, air conditioning or any of the other components of the 21st century, except for that they all make us way more productive and in touch.
Employers who embrace this and make it work for them will reap huge rewards, those with control agendas or luddite tendencies will pay the penalty.
I don't see what you can possibly do in this situation, short of quitting. If they don't trust their own employees, then they're not going to be receptive to employee feedback. If you dissent politely, they'll smile and ignore you. If you dissent rudely, you'll just reinforce their patronizing attitude.
And playing work-to-rule games ("I didn't know the server was down because my cell was switched off, as per policy") isn't going to help either. It's just another way of communicating something the bosses don't want to hear, except that it also makes them look stupid. Which is not likely to make them receptive.
Sometimes management falls into the mode of treating employees like spoiled children -- people who can't be communicated with, only bullied into a semblance of correct behavior. If you can figure out a way to change that attitude, you've really got something (like a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize!). If you can't, there's not a lot you can do.
If he needs to be paged at all hours and they won't allow him to use a personal phone they should make his phone a business. Chances are if he's being paged at all hours he might need to be calling people too.
That's the deal here. My phone is a company phone and the company has will take over the payments for anyone who already has their own mobiles and needs to be contactable for work purposes (it's still their phone and number if they leave). Getting to make personal calls on company money is just an upside to the downside of being woken up at 4am when a router farts and your server isn't contactable for a minute.
It shouldn't be a major issue to point the paging system at a different number if the guy leaves or is on holiday.
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You made your point, here's mine.
If it's that important to your company, they should pay for it, period.
You shouldn't need to subsidize their uptime. They should pay your cellphone, they should pay you "extra" to have a cellphone that improves their uptime. Those things have business value, and should be recognized by even the most pointy-haired boss out there(hint: if not, he's just using a negotiating tactic, and playing dumb about it too)
Your PERSONAL cell phone you should leave at home... And only carry when off-duty... And yes, that might mean you need 2 cell phones, and that precious few(if any) people ever have both numbers without a gold-plated marble writ from God.
Some of us make a business of uptime, and I would highly resent your giving in on this without a fight... You should thank me for giving you back your life, when you're not on-duty, you can finally turn the cell phone off..
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My cell phone is never off, but that's because thats the service I sell to my clents. Me, 7 days a week, 24 hous a day.