The Court of Appeal in Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service stated:
“We hold that when employees must use their personal cellphones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them. Whether the employees have cellphone plans with unlimited minutes or limited minutes, the reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of their cellphone bills.” [Read the CIO article here]
This ruling changes the BYOD landscape forever. There are still a lot of variable, but the decision just increased the number of eligible employees to be reimbursed by everyone that you allow to connect to your corporate email or make work calls from their personal cell phone.
What are you going to do? The simple answer is formalize your policies around corporate use of personal cellphones.
- You are going to have to decide how much to reimburse different employees categories.
- Determine if your employee receives voice only reimbursement or voice and data
- How much money for each, what is a “reasonable” amount?
- Will the monthly payment be a static or variable number based upon usage?
- What are the tax implications of the reimbursements?
- How will you track it? Who will own the upkeep?
- How many hours will it take in support from IT, Finance and Human Resources?
- We haven’t even thought about security! Network, Corporate Data, Customer Information….
I can hear you asking yourself, didn’t we do BYOD to save time and money – make it easier on everyone?
Well, it may not work out that way after all. Even if you set up the proper processes and your employees to agree to let the company wipe their personal device back to factory settings; it is just the start.
There are other more cost effective and efficient options in the market today. You don’t have to go it alone.
Let’s talk about what you’re trying to accomplish and how we can help. You can schedule a free consultation about your mobility policy by emailing info@myarg.com
