What Remote Companies Should Know About BYOA

You’ve heard of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). You’ve also heard of BYOB (although that’s a completely different topic!). And now there’s a new acronym that’s taken up residence in the remote workplace: BYOA.

Bring Your Own Apps (BYOA) is often done by remote workers who find that the technological tools that their company is offering them are outdated, slow, mismatched to their work needs, or a combination of all of the above. The infographic, The Workplace App Explosion, by internal communications specialist Newsweaver, discovered some interesting trends among remote workers in the European Union, particularly when it comes to apps and usage.

To start, approximately one in five people in the EU workforce spend 10 hours or more a week working remotely. This is comparable to the U.S. But two out of five employees claim that the mobile devices they use for work are old and slow. This is difficult, seeing as how four in 10 organizations will rely on a BYOD policy by next year.

That’s where BYOA comes in. Remote workers (particularly generation Y) are finding that using third-party apps (like Dropbox, for example) and cloud services can help them boost their productivity. So not surprisingly then, more than half of employees admit to using rogue apps to do their jobs without prior consent from their company’s IT department. But IT workers can understand remote workers’ frustration: three in four IT workers know that they are giving outdated tools that don’t meet employees’ needs. To add insult to injury, more than 50 percent of IT workers don’t even think that remote workers will ever use the IT-sanctioned apps and devices!

So what are remote employers to do to help their workers and also manage a remote workforce? Behold—enterprise apps! These apps are created by employers specifically to meet their employees’ needs. Enterprise apps can boost productivity by a whopping 34 percent, and more than one in two employees report that using enterprise apps helps them perform in their positions more effectively. Add to this that companies stand to gain six extra working weeks per employee, per year, and it makes good business sense to create the apps that allow remote workers to do their jobs.

But there is a downside to enterprise apps. More than half of those surveyed (54 percent) claim that their companies already have enterprise apps in place. However, 45 percent of IT departments cannot create the apps that the remote workers need, and fail company expectations. Plus, each enterprise app can cost upwards of $100,000 to design, develop, and launch, as well as can take from eight to 18 weeks to build and launch. Now you can see why some companies, particularly smaller remote ones, can’t afford to make the apps that their remote workers depend upon to get their jobs done.

After all this discussion of BYOA and enterprise apps, the question remains: why do remote workers even need these apps at all? Well, a staggering number of telecommuting employees (90 percent, to be exact) claim that a lack of communication is a reason for workplace problems. And workers who use mobile apps are three times more likely to be connected to their workplace than those who don’t. If a remote employee feels connected to his workplace, not only will he be more productive, but he’ll feel more connected to the company, fostering greater loyalty and improved performance.