According to analyst group Gartner, enterprises could make significant savings by paying staff to use their own laptops. The report suggested that a monthly payment of £47 per employee would be cost effective and attractive to staff. Gartner said that schemes that encourage staff to use their own laptops would reduce maintenance and support costs and improve productivity.
In general, I like this idea. However, I imagine that it works better with freelancers than with full time employees. During my time in international development, the consultants that worked for me were contracted to bring their own computing firepower - it was part of their contract. If they failed to bring a laptop on a foreign trip, they had to make alternative arrangements, or they wouldn’t be able to work and wouldn’t get paid.
For the salaried, I wonder what would happen when the laptop breaks down totally and the employee cannot afford to repair or replace it immediately. Does the firm have to have surplus ’spare capacity’ machines to prevent this potential downtime, thus eliminating any cost saving? Or does the employee get disciplined in the same way that they would turning up to work without any clothes.
Incidentally, I picked this up from the weblog of Steve Dale, a knowledge management consultant that I met last week at 2gether08.
