What is considered fair use of mobile phones in the work place?
Mobile phones came into mainstream use back in about 1990 and it changed my world forever. The landscape gardener probably was a very early beneficiary of phones coming into the mainstream because of the mobile nature of their work.
before mobiles it was normal for me to rush to a telephone box to check on deliveries or arrange meetings because I was far from the office.
I remember getting my first Nokia, a rugged hard cased gadget with a rubber duck aerial. However, mobile it was but versatile and easy to store it was not.
Today there is an array of small unobtrusive machines to choose from with Internet and multimedia content functions. But the purpose of this post is not to discuss the phone itself but to highlight the dilemma an employer faces when allocating a phone to an employee or agreeing to pay a portion of their private bill for work use.
Problems arise because it brings the employees social and home life to work with them. The employer needs to keep in contact during the day but so does the wife and girlfriend or his mates. Many minutes can be lost in a working day to personal use which add up to hours in a week which add up to man days in a year.
It sounds picky but there is a huge cost to industry caused by personal use of mobile phones at work and it is hard to police. The employer is standing on dodgy ground if he tries to be too heavy handed and only really has a handle on the time that is lost if he has the phone bill delivered to him. There is no real way of telling if the mobile is owned by the employee as to how long of the bosses time is wasted during the day.
One of my employees spent 8 hours on the telephone calling ACAS to understand his rights after he misunderstood what we told him when he handed in his notice.
We employed a young lad who was using both the works mobile, allocated to the maintenance team, and his own phone at the same time. He was texting his girlfriend on one and receiving on the other. He spent 2 days, yes 16 hours in one week on the phone.
Sadly, I feel a problem that is set to blight businesses forever. It is a fine line to tread and you can but set out a fair telephone usage policy in the employees contract before you take someone on and hope for the best.
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