BYOD or COPE? Do You Allow Employees To Use Their Own Devices For Work?

     The evolution of personal mobile devices - and the rise of how necessary they are to business success these days - are forcing many small business owners to make a choice. BYOD or COPE? Or: "Bring Your Own Device" vs. "Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled".

The Typical Solution - BYOD. According to the CDW 2012 Small Business Mobility Report, 89% of small-business employees use their personal mobile devices for work. But the headache involved here is how do you support and secure all of these devices? The scary thing is that most small businesses don't even try! The CDW survey found that only 1 in 5 small businesses have deployed (or plan to deploy) any systems for managing and securing employees' personal devices.

The Alternative - Is COPE Any Better? A minority of small businesses has implemented a Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled ("COPE") policy instead. They buy their employees' mobile devices, secure them, and then let employees load additional personal applications that they want or need. And, the employers control what types of apps can be added, too. The "personally enabled" aspect of COPE allows employees to choose the company-approved device they prefer while permitting them to use it both personally and professionally. COPE is certainly more controlled and secure, but for a business with a limited budget, buying devices for every employee can add up pretty quick. If you go the COPE route and are large enough to buy in volume, you can likely negotiate substantial discounts.

Security Concerns With BYOD. If you have client information that must be kept secure or other industry specific regulations regarding the security of client data, then COPE is likely your best approach. It takes out any gray area of whose data is whose. Plus there is a certain comfort level in being able to recover or confiscate any device for any reason at any time to protect your company without any worries of device ownership.

Advice For BYOD Companies. Despite the numerous advantages of COPE, most small businesses will still choose BYOD because it can save them money. Here are two of Lawrence Reusing's (General Manager of Global Mobile Security at Imation) important rules for BYOD. Consider these when creating your mobile device policy:

1. Assume employees will use personal devices on the corporate network even if they are told not to. 50% of employees use personal devices to take confidential data out of companies every day.

2. Assume employees value convenience more than security. If your policies are inconvenient, employees will work around them.

Prepared, Equipped and Armed  

With the Right Habits

By Robert Stevenson

      www.robertstevenson.org    

At the peak of their expansion, Starbucks was opening seven new stores every day and adding 15,000 employees every week. How did a small coffee shop in Seattle end up with over 17,000 stores and revenues of more than $10 billion, selling $4 coffee in a fancy cup? How did Starbucks build such an incredible organization that has over 135,000 employees? How do they get their new employees to show up on time and excel at delivering exceptional customer service, especially when many of them are young, unskilled, and lacking little, if any, experience in business? If you knew the answers to those questions, do you think it might help you expand your business or, on a personal level, help you become more successful? Let me give you just a little insight to their formula for success.

Howard Behar, the former president of Starbucks once said, "We're not in the coffee business, serving people. We're in the people business, serving coffee."When your entire business model is built around delivering exceptional customer service, you have got to figure out a way to instill the necessary self-discipline in your people so they can correctly handle almost any situation. Long lines, complicated orders, and dealing with sometimes angry, mean, and in-a-hurry customers can be a daily routine for an employee at Starbucks. So why are Starbucks employees so good at dealing with it?

It all starts with training. Each first-year employee will spend over 50 hours in the classroom and more time at home studying workbooks or conversing with mentors. Starbucks spends hours upon hours developing powerful habits to prepare their people for the onslaught of customers. They have found that following disciplined habits will enable people to deal with almost any challenge they face. The focus on life skills helps people handle their emotions and shows them how to deliver a burst of energy, pep, and enthusiasm when dealing with every customer. They role-play with them, interact with them, help, guide, nurture and show them how to handle many different situations.

Starbucks has spent millions of dollars creating courses that train their people on not just the steps of the process, but more importantly, on how to maintain the self-discipline to "do it" every time. One acronym Starbucks uses to help their people is LATTE. It stands for Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take Action by solving the problem, Thank them, and then Explain why the problem occurred. Starbucks has developed numerous routines for their employees to follow to help them during stressful situations. By developing these routines, they are helping their people create the right habits to serve their customers. When an employee is prepared, equipped, and armed with the right habits to address almost any situation, delivering exceptional customer service becomes easy

Congratulations to Katie Freisatz, Recruiting and Research Coordinator at KCO Resource Management in Clifton Park.She was the first to correctly answer last month's trivia quiz, below:

a) Motor Vehicle

b) Telephone

c) Light bulb

d) Bicycle

The correct answer is B: telephone.

Would you like to win a pair of movie tickets? Be the first to answer this month's trivia question:

April is named after the Greek goddess, Aphrodite. She is the goddess of:

a) Fire

b) Light

c) Love

d) Spring

E-mail us right now with your answer at: trivia@groffnetworks.com

Please note: One prize per entrant per year. Entrants who have won a trivia contest in the last 12 months are ineligible to compete for prizes.

Shiny New Gadget of the Month  

Ultra-Small Bluetooth

Location Stickers  

   With Stick-N-Find, never lose your keys again! Find your remote control, track your luggage or keep a virtual leash on your pet fluffy so that you get notified when they go too far away.

   About the size of a quarter and 0.16 inches thin, you can stick these just about anywhere! Stick them to any device, person or animal and find them with your smartphone.

   With an Apple iOS or Android app, you can view your misplaced items on a radar screen and decide if you would like to have it buzz, flash or do both. Or, create a "virtual leash" with the sticker - if that sticker moves away more than a selected distance, your phone will alarm you. Lastly, "Find It" alerts allow you to be alerted when your lost item comes in range of your phone.

   Stick-N-Find Stickers have a Range of about 100 feet with a battery that lasts for over a year.

Find out more at www.sticknfind.com 

5 Easy Ways To Spring Clean Your Computer For Maximum Performance

With spring in the air - yes, the snow will stop sometime!- now is a good time to do an annual clean up of the computers, servers and electronic equipment in your office, both inside and out. Failure to thoroughly clean your computers and servers at least once each year will result in decreased performance and, possibly, even system failures.

Here's why:

Dust clogs the computer's cooling system, causing it to heat up and damage sensitive electronic equipment. Dust can also cause fan noise and (believe it or not) slow performance!

Crumbs and dirt in your keyboard can cause keys to stick and crunchy sounds when typing. Plus, it's just gross and unhealthy! Do you know there are more germs on your computer keyboard than the average public toilet? Even dust, fingerprints and dirt build-up will make your computer monitor dim and fuzzy.

But the physical "dirt" is only the beginning...

Here are five quick steps you can take today to clean up your systems and improve performance:

1. Use Disk Cleanup to delete temporary files, unused programs and any other files taking up space and slowing things down. (Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup)

2. Defrag your hard drive to speed up access to your data. (Start > Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools > Defragment your hard drive).

3. Update your spyware and antivirus software with the newest definitions. The internet changes fast. Having outdated security can slow you down dramatically.

4. Make sure you have the latest security patches and updates installed and configured properly.

5. Check your backups and conduct an emergency "restore" of the data. Remember, the best time to check your backups is when you DON'T desperately need to recover your data!

If you are a MyNetWorks client, rest assured that Groff NetWorks is

already doing steps 1-5 for you!

To learn more about this and other benefits from signing up for our MyNetWorks plan, please call us at: 518-320-8906!

Office Notes

Our newest addition!

This just in: Lori Hardy, our office manager extraordinaire, just delivered her baby boy, Dylan Robert Lewis, on Saturday, April 6. He was 3 lbs., 14 oz. and 16 inches long, born eight weeks early! Lori asks for lots of prayer for this new transition. Go to:  facebook.com/groffnetworks for updates and pictures. 

We're hiring!

We will be hiring for additional technical positions this year and are looking to get to know some additional potential candidates. Refer them to us, or send a resume to: resume@groffnetworks.com

For more information, call Chad at: 518-320-8906 x100 or email: clinen@groffnetworks.com

The Lighter Side:

April Showers Bring...Laughter!

Q. What season is it when you are on a trampoline?

A. Spring-time!

Q. When do monkeys fall from the sky?

A. During Ape-ril showers!

Q. Can February March?

A. No, but April May!

Q. What flowers grow on faces?

A. Tulips (Two-lips)!

Q. Why is the letter A like a flower?

A. A bee (B) comes after it!!