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Spoiling staff with toys could turn against your business

Keep BYOD under control

Out in the wild

Does your mail server permit people to set auto-forwards on their email inboxes? Probably. Do you know where people are forwarding their email to? If not, find the report on your mail system that shows you.

I mentioned earlier that you shouldn't let people access their corporate email directly from their personal devices. I have seen companies that have restricted such access very sensibly – so the users have simply set auto-forwards on incoming email to send the messages to their Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo accounts, which in turn are viewable on their phones.

Which is, of course, even worse than simple phone-based email access.

Any company with any sense also monitors internet access over its corporate connections and blocks access to nefarious sites. You are perfectly entitled to control and log what happens on your corporate network, which includes your connection to the internet – after all it is your network. If you have any sense your staff are contractually bound to a usage policy that makes it clear what you can access.

Do you have a guest wireless network for visitors? Monitor that as well if you can because if someone accesses anything illegal you may in extreme circumstances end up answering some difficult questions posed by men in blue uniforms.

You would be really daft not to monitor internet access at all. I have seen members of staff object to certain entities being blocked, but while things can occasionally get fraught it is my experience that more often than not common sense prevails.

Bring in the enforcers

As Gordon Gekko didn't say* in the 1987 film Wall Street: “Greed is good”. I would add that “B*ll*ckings are better”.

Many moons ago I was working with a company which had pretty solid policies and processes but not much discipline – the IT team was great and they did some amazing work, but as is often the case they were a bit informal and gung-ho.

It didn't help that one or two of them considered themselves indispensable. Processes continued to be ignored until one week one of the developers figured (wrongly) that I wouldn't notice if he bypassed a security mechanism on the database server, and one of the indispensables behaved outrageously to another member of staff.

The former was on the receiving end of a comprehensive b*ll*cking, followed by an explanation of why the rules existed, which to his credit he accepted with grace and from that point was as good as gold.

The latter was told that the next attempt would land him in HR under the banner of gross misconduct; when he went crying to management that I had been nasty to him they backed me to the hilt.

In most cases then, having the mechanisms to do things right is enough. But when those mechanisms have full management backing and you are seen to act (fairly) on infractions, it soon fixes the minority who think, “that doesn't apply to me”.

No means no

Staff engagement is a good thing. Staff who feel that the company cares and gives them stuff or pays attention to their comments and suggestions are generally more inclined to work diligently.

Remember, though, that the staff engagement team is generally part of the HR team. You know, the team that makes people redundant, or dismisses them for gross misconduct, or puts them through disciplinary or competency proceedings.

The operational efficiency and security of company systems are the first priority of the IT department because they are directly related to profitability.

So you are not there to give people what they want; the best they can expect is that their opinions will be sought and given due consideration in the construction of standards and systems.

So listen to what people want. Understand what they need. Help them be as efficient as possible within the constraints you have to impose. But remember that the word “no” is often much under-used. ®

* No, really. He actually said: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good”.

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