Own the Phone!

When it comes to mobile equipping your workers, its best practice for companies to explicitly “own” and retain all rights to the phone numbers they allocate to employees. This is to minimize relationship breakage in the event that the employee departs from the company. For example, you don’t want potential customers to be unable to reach salespeople. This policy requires a concomitant “employee-departure process” that explicitly defines how to handle an employee’s contact information (email, IM ID, phone number) after his/her departure. Often there is an established IT process to forward calls and correspondence to a peer, or supervisor. Although the company owns the device and services, it’s generally preferable to support a reasonable amount of personal use, rather than prohibit all personal use. Effective personal-use policies vary widely, and there is no one-size-fits-all recommendation. However, some general principles include prohibiting international personal calls, prohibiting calls to “pay-per-minute” numbers (e.g. adult hotlines, as these calls are not only expensive, they’re likely to be in violation of HR requirements), permitting a reasonable amount of domestic calls (usually under a pooled-minute plan, discussed below) and add-on features such as text messaging (helpful for employees that need to stay in touch with their children).