More Indian Workers Demanding BYOD

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According to the New Way of Work Study 2012, conducted across 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, there is evidence that working on personal smartphones and tablets, and using social media, actually make people more productive at the workplace.

This is especially true in India, where 82 percent of employees are provided with a portable device from their employer, but 77 percent still bring their own device to work to help them complete their tasks. Of this group, 72 percent claimed to be more productive when they worked on the device of their choice, and 70 percent claimed to be happier in their role when they were allowed to use a device of their choice. 66 percent say they feel less stressed when they can choose the IT tools they use.

Indian workers also indicated that the need to be mobile and connected was firing their desire to use personal mobile devices at work. This is demonstrated by high incidences of employees in India bringing their personal smartphones (78 percent) to the workplace, followed by laptops (53 percent), and tablets (17 percent). The research shows that many respondents are actually working outside the office; 79 percent are working from home and 53 percent on the road, which is considerably higher than the average across the region.

In fact, 47 percent of the Indian workers among the respondents felt their work environments were restricting their ability to use their own portable device. (Specifically, this group consists of 2,077 people, ages 18 to 64 years old, who worked in organizations with more than 1,000 staff globally for at least 15 hours or more a week across Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Japan, and South Korea.) Thus, current IT policies in Indian companies on use of personal devices actually lowered their potential work efficiency.

There are many reports that are equally gung-ho about BYOD in India: The Cisco Connected World Technology Report, the Citrix Workplace of the Future, the Accenture CIO Mobility Survey, and so on. There is no denying we are still on the hype-cycle, but if the virtual worker is really dictating work policy, how are organizations responding at the ground level?

CIOs seem to be graduating from the initial stage of creating "permitted devices" lists, and are now focusing on securing the infrastructure. This shift in BYOD tactics is partly a reaction to protests from lower-paid employees.