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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."
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
Actually, both my friends who work in the government and my father who works in a hospital have this requirement. One has to do with security, the other with interference of pacemakers and electronic equipment. Sometimes a cell-phone ban (though I'm not in favor of it) actually is the responsible thing to do.
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.
So I can send an application. Cell phone free work place, bliss.
I'd just reconfigure your alerts to be transmitted by email and kick back and let the good times roll.
Beep beep.
and even quitting in protest of the new policy
I hate the damn things, you go ahead and quit. On your way out could you put in a good word for me?
Connect the servers to the company's paging system. A few weeks of hearing "THE SERVER IS DOWN!!" at 120 decibels ought to make them reconsider.
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.
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...
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.
Then you can set up some techno music too, and it'll be like homestar runner.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
I have a number of servers and custom applications configured to notify me by text message, in the event of a problem.
If I were you... I woudl think it would be in your best interest to get them to sport for either an alphanumeric pager, or a two way pager.
Just a oneway alpha/numeric pager should work as well as your current mobile setup, may not even require changes to your script.
Two way pager may be able to be attached to a serial port... provided you use TTL levels, and just accept error messages regardless of whether you have a network connection or not.
It seems to me that you are doing your job and using your equipment to do it. If they won't allow you to bring in your own equipment it's only common sence for them to buy it.
Otherwise, you can invest in a handheld internet terminal, which while can be used as a mobile phone, are more likely to inspire sympathy as being a IT required device. Unless they plan to ban handheld palm like devices.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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
Here is my delima. I pay my phone bill, it is my cell phone. Yet 98% of the calls I recieve are work related. We have a zero tolerance policy also for cell phones. Which I adhere to as does everyone else. When I forget to turn MY phone back on after leaving work, I get my ass chewed. Yet my company pays for none of the minutes they use. I recently had my cell phone disconnected for currency issues ( lack thereof ). I was told that I had one week in which to have it turned back on or lose my job.
I had no clue what to do in this situation either. It has gotten to the point where I could no longer afford the bill I was getting every month for a service that turned out to be work related. I have tried showing and even turning in a copy of my cell bill showing the company use, and requesting reimbursement. You know what, it never happened. Yet make one long distance call at work, and you get blasted.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
One of my former employers had to implement a ban on personal devices unless otherwise approved because the salespeople were all bringing in personal laptops and wanting to use them despite the fact that they had perfectly good computers on their desks. This was getting to the point that they were starting to trip the circuit breaker and taking the entire room's power down.
The reason they wanted to use their own laptops became a bit of a turf war. See, these were mostly new sales reps who had worked for other companies before joining ours. They wanted to keep their sales contact list on their own laptop so they could bring it from employer to employer. The company wanted them to store their sales leads only on the company server because even though sales reps could only see their own accounts, when a rep leaves it becomes very easy to split their leads list among other reps and also limits the outgoing rep's ability to contact their existing accounts under a new employer.
The IT department's offer was to convert any contact database into our system. We never did get any reps who took us up on that, but some left in protest of being unable to keep their laptops up-to-date.
As a DBA I face the same type of thing every day. When setting up a server I ask for their tolerance of downtime and suggest solutions. If they aren't willing to 'pay' for those features then thats their call.
Also, why were the cellphones banned? Is there sensitive work done onsite? Are they afraid of the new cellphones with built in cameras? Does it interfere with some electronics? There may be a valid reason behind the ban.
As long as your ass is covered (ie, you explained the situation to managment) then whats the problem? Are alpha-numeric pagers banned as well? Why not pick up one of those? You can still get your alerts and friends can still contact you.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
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.
Clarification from the submitter:
Though this policy was abandoned due to my concerns prior to being implemented, it still has relevance in many places. Let me answer some of the questions that have been asked.
Work was, in-fact, saying that I cannot bring in my personal cell phone. Though they don't pay me for for the phone bill itself, I do get compensated for responding to server-down pages or other problems after hours and this more than pays for the phone bill.
Why are they doing this? The stated reason is security. We've been the victim of intellectual property theft due to camera phones, but in my case: it isn't an issue. I have, in effect, clearance to any and all company documents at this location and all others.
As for forwarding my responsibilities to my supervisor, it just won't work. I report directly to the president of the company and he is not exactly a power-user. I've been with the company just over three years, and he's never even glanced at any of my coding work. He simply believes the heads of other departments when they note that their IT systems are doing well, saving money, or whatever the case is.
To save this poor guy a headache: I am not Brian Cancio. I don't own that domain and have no involvement with it whatsoever. Digitalvengeance is just a slashdot ID as my usual alias was already taken.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
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
It is a pain, indeed, but there *are* some valid reasons for controlling what equipment is brought on campus. It does create problems, e.g. a visiting professor brings his own laptop, or a company wants to provide on loan some equipment, or you are doing a joint research project with another institution and they send you some equipment to use, etc...
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
Just hold you're phone next to a CRT or an amplifier whilst making/receiving a call, if you don't believe they can interfere with electronic equipment! They do have seem to have to be within a metre or two for a significant effect, though....
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.
I have an office phone, but I don't always sit in my office. I am frequently in meetings, visiting other locations, performing system tests in other locations, etc. It is frequently 3 or 4 hours between stops at my desk to check my messages, my email, etc. The company would not be happy if a critical service was down for 3 or 4 hours because I was busy elsewhere.
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.
I don't use it for this very much, though our T1 provider does notify me via cell phone if there is a problem after hours.
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.
I don't make/take personal calls at work with only few rare exceptions. I am far too busy to!
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.
All alerts are for work-owned and work-dedicated servers. Though I do contract with other companies and do have alerts sent to my phone, they are ignored until after business hours. My primary responsibility is to my primary employer.
Interestingly, even in this tight IT market, my company values IT employees otherwise. I am moving soon and the company is bending over backwards to let me keep my position despite the fact that I'll be living 2 hours from our closest office.
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Every time someone asked me something stupid, I opened 2 beers - one for me and one for my Newfie.
Boss comes in, sees 8 empties lined up behind the monitor, and a drunk dog passed out on the floor snoring ...
End result - fewer stupid questions. Sometimes you've got to go completely against the grain to make a point.
executives do not pull powerpoint presentations out of their asses.
you sure about that?
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
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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