According to the survey by Oxford economics, many organizations give their teams cell phone allowances to make working on the go easier than ever before.
In a digital-first world, employees are now not only working from home but from every corner of the world. Communicating through your phone is more important than ever. These policies have encouraged the staff to use their devices for the company’s business.
Cell phone allowance, often known as cell phone reimbursements or mobile stipends, is the compensation you provide to your workers for mobile use. These payments are usually valid only when you are using your mobile for the company’s work including:
In some cases, organizations may give you money to buy another phone or provide you with a company phone altogether. Employers often payout the compensation either monthly or yearly, depending on the policy.
Many companies across various industries offer phones and phone plans as part of their benefits. Buffer is a leading, fully remote marketing company that offers several work stipends. It includes stipends for
Due to dubious law from state to state, companies are largely creating policies of their own. Some companies considered
There are several benefits of providing allowances for your employees including:
One of the most popular and straightforward solutions is to pay for the entire cell phone bill. It is less of an operational No. Giving cellphone allowance does not hold any taxes for either party and is 100% IRS compliant
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the way we work has changed dramatically. Working from our phones and laptops is more important than ever. As stated earlier, cellphone allowance only covers what they have spent on mobile work. Many companies stick to this stipend only.
However, to attend meetings with no disruption, an employee may get a headset that cancels noises or other equipment.
Work-support stipends give the employees more control over how they use the money to increase their work efficiency.
Many public sector organizations and large companies provide their employees an average of $36 per month for cellphone stipends, which totals to around $430/year per employee.
If you are a smaller organization, consider giving $30 or less each month, depending on the complexity of your work.
BYOD stands for “Bring Your Own Device.” Whereas COPE stands for “Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled.”
In BYOD, the employees bring their cell phones and use them for corporate work. However, in the COPE setting, companies buy mobiles and provide them to their employees to use. In the latter policy, the company keeps an eye on each allocated device and notes its usage.
You can choose the COPE policy if privacy is of concern. Moreover, this policy makes it easy to manage the devices as they are of the same type and need some repairs. But your employees may feel burden carrying two phones.
BYOD is more affordable, as you only need to pay a smaller amount for their work calls and phone repairs, nothing more. Although it may feel like a better option, your IT department may have a hard time managing different types of cell phones.
You can provide cellphone allowances in the following ways:
An expense your company must bear for the employees
An additional benefit
As a work equipment stipend
While setting up a cell phone allowance policy for your company, you need to perform the following steps:
Suppose an employee’s cellphone breaks or malfunctions. In that case, your reimbursement policy should be flexible enough to pay for the repairs. For that, you can pay the amount within cellphone allowance money, so they pay for the repair.
An affordable option would be to work with a company like trufyx, bringing on-demand phone repairs directly to the homes, offices, cars, or pretty much any location of your employees.
How to get repairs from trufyx?
Trufyx has a dedicated team of certified technicians that offer you repairs at your doorsteps. By using the trufyx corporate program, you get fast repairs at your (or your employees’) location, and an account to track and manage all repairs.
Once a month, stay-in-the-know kind of relationship.