Are you a small business owner? Do you have employees with company phones? You might even be an operations manager of a large corporate organization with more than 500 employees who need company mobile phones.
The cost to company of smartphone usage
The number of mobile phones you have to manage is not the most important point of this discussion. What is essential to note is that keeping mobile phone bills under control is sometimes a huge challenge. While some employees might intentionally abuse the privilege of a company phone to make all their private calls, send text messages, and spend hours on social media, most people are not aware of the time spent on their phones during working hours, both personal and company phones.
Here are a few statistics proving how addictive a mobile phone can be, and how much time is spent on a phone:
- The average daily time spent on a cell phone is three and one-quarter (3.25) hours.
- A typical smartphone user touches their phone 2 617 times a day.
If we consider the first statistic and assume that the average daily time spent on a phone is during working hours, employees are only productive for 4.75 hours out of an eight-hour workday. These are staggering statistics. Therefore, the cost to the company of the average company phone usage includes the dollar cost of the phone calls and data usage and the cost per hour of the time spent on the phone during working hours.
Tracking and monitoring company smartphones
Therefore, the question that must be asked and answered is, how do you prevent mobile phone costs from spiraling out of control.
The answer to this question is that you install usage monitoring software on each of your company phones.
There is an iOS and an Android app to spy on text messages, social media platform interactions, log calls, as well as providing a record of the total time spent on each phone.
The next question that begs is whether there are legal ramifications to implementing a mobile phone usage tracking business policy that insists on installing spy apps on all of your company phones.
The good news is that there are no legal ramifications to installing a spy app on company phones if:
- You or your company own the phones. You cannot enforce the installation of a spy app on your employee's personal mobile devices.
- You must notify the employees that you have installed the spy app on their company phones.
Why install a spy app
As described above, the cost to the company of mobile phone usage can be expensive, especially if employees are using company phones for private use both at home and during working hours. Secondly, the company will also incur a cost if employees use their personal phones during company hours. These costs can quickly become prohibitive and financially bankrupt the business if rigorous intervention measures are not implemented.
The simplest and most effective way to reduce the cost of a company phone is to install a mobile phone spy app like the Android text messaging spy app highlighted above. The solution for the overuse of private phones on company time is not so easy to solve. The best possible solution is to ban the use of private phones on company time if the usage gets out of control. Otherwise, the simplest way is to allow employees access to their phones on a trust basis and only intervene once the trust has been abused.
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