Businesses forecast huge increase in mobile workforce

To help businesses realise this potential, O2 is sharing insight and learnings drawn from its ‘Bring-Your-Own’ (BYO) programme, which it launched in December 2011.

A first for the telecoms business, BYO is now used by 60 per cent of O2’s Slough HQ workforce and continues to grow. Employees are empowered to access the network via their personal devices, helping to improve their productivity and work/life balance, by enabling them to shape their own ways of working on the devices they like best.

David Plumb, General Manager of Enterprise at Telefónica UK said: “We started our BYO programme by asking industry IT decision makers and employees, as well as our own staff to find out what they wanted from consumerisation. Since BYO launched in December, we have received ongoing feedback about the ease of working while out and about, giving them greater work/life balance. Financially, we have also seen cost savings already overtake the money spent to launch the programme. As a result, the BYO programme has been a great success and we are now planning to use the UK blueprint for a wider global deployment across the entire Telefónica business.”

Ben Dowd, O2 Business Director, said: “Building on the success of our flexible working pilot, the Bring-Your-Own trial is the next phase in our journey to empower our staff to use their own devices. Following the success of the trial in the UK, O2 has a wealth of learnings and experience that we can share with enterprises thinking of introducing a similar programme. We understand that businesses want more from their network and it’s only by truly walking in our customers’ shoes that we can deliver expert tailored advice and help. From choosing and setting up software to answering questions on what pitfalls to avoid, we want to apply our own learnings to give much-needed guidance so that our customers can concentrate on what they do best – running their business.”