Mac and PC: Why It Matters to Today's Employees

If you've spent time wondering how to ensure your employees are happier on the job, more engaged, higher-performing and more likely to stay with your company, you're not alone. During the Great Resignation of 2021, 47M workers quit their jobs. This massive shift challenged business leaders to focus on improving overall employee experience—especially in IT where there is also a skills gap.

Today's talent pool is so lean, good talent is in top demand. Not only are post-pandemic employees seeking companies that align with their values, but they also want organizations that demonstrate social and environmental responsibility, offer work-life balance and provide flexibility in how, when and where they work. Employees have grown accustomed to working from home on the devices they know and can easily access. But you know better than anyone, when they bring these devices to work, it can wreak havoc on an already-stretched IT organization.

As employees are moving back to the office or adapting to a hybrid work-from-anywhere approach, it is more important than ever to provide access to the tools and technologies they prefer—in a way that also works
for IT.

Studies show that when employees are offered their choice of devices, the whole company benefits from improved engagement, a healthy culture of ownership and better employee retention and loyalty. (1)

Although that might seem like a stretch, business and IT leaders have found that the more choice they can offer their employees, the better the employee experience. Which, incidentally, adds up to better overall client experience.

When providing employees with computers, mobile phones, tablets or wearables in the home or office—whether Mac® or PC or both—good, consistent, easy to access devices and applications really matter, as do seamless access to data and working on devices that help them feel comfortable and confident.

Mac and PC: Let the choice be theirs.

Since device choice is so important, here are five tips you can follow to deliver the devices your employees want, all while avoiding the headaches IT doesn't want.

5 tips to bolster employee device choice within your organization

1. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

If you are part of a traditional IT organization, you may feel hesitant about managing different types of devices, especially when it comes to Apple® products. You may be concerned that managing disparate devices will add complexity to your already overloaded list of responsibilities. While it's true that your IT environment has likely grown increasingly complex, the process for supporting Apple devices has grown easier.

You may be legitimately unsure about how to secure different devices.

Keep in mind, Mac is fundamentally secure with powerful built-in technologies. Those combined with deployment-specific solutions can help you ensure your employee devices and data are protected.

Although change can feel risky, there are programs in place designed to guide you toward easy adoption. For instance, World Wide Technology has mastered bringing Apple into a heterogeneous mix of devices. They have done so themselves, company-wide, and helped hundreds of companies across all industries do it successfully too. There are also programs and services from Apple that enable your IT staff to deploy and support iOS and macOS® with ease.

While Apple is inherently centered on the human experience, WWT is focused on delivering smart, streamlined and user-friendly experiences for your employees. By delivering from strategy to execution and fostering end user adoption, WWT delivers valuable solutions that advance productivity and accelerate outcomes for its customers around the globe.

Apple devices are built to be intuitive and accessible—which is good news for the IT departments that decide to integrate them. Here are a few of the ways that demonstrate Apple plays well with others :

Apple allows users to move easily across devices—from iPad® to iPhone® to Mac—for a seamless experience.
Apple devices have built-in productivity software, are compatible with enterprise-critical solutions, and work with top business apps so employees have everything they need to get started as early as day one.
Mac is easily managed. Apple devices are effortless to set up, distribute and manage at scale. Mac seamlessly integrates with mobile device management (MDM) solutions for more control and added peace of mind.

2. Be strategic and have a plan.

You will want to establish your vision upfront and then design an actionable roadmap for your corporate-provisioned employee choice program. Your plan should explain why your company is empowering Apple and employee choice.

You will want to refer to this vision with every stakeholder, team or department you speak with. That is the best way to gain support within your organization.

Creating a timeline of events, setting goals and milestones helps to establish phases. It's always easier to bite off a little at a time rather than eating the whole elephant.

Don't forget about Mac Employee Choice (MEC)—a comprehensive resource that can be leveraged to facilitate your planning sessions, promote milestone setting, drive communications within your organization and prepare to help your employees get the most from their Mac user experience.

Once you have a plan in place, you can easily test it through WWT's Advanced Technology Center (ATC). Here, you can run a pilot, and then see how quickly you can scale throughout the rest of your organization.

3. Find a program where you can manage everything from one vantage point.

Fear of the unknown can make that scary, but WWT offers a Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) solution, whether VMware Workspace ONE, Microsoft MEM or Citrix.

Unified Endpoint Management gives you a simple way to manage multiple device types with a consistent set of tools, ensuring security while also providing flexibility and high-quality user experience.

Some IT organizations have even conducted ROI studies to see how advantageous UEM can be, because it handles a broad range of devices and types with a single tool and fewer people. This data can help challenge perceptions within the company, positioning your IT department as less of a cost center and more of a business enabler.

4. Break down silos and rethink responsibilities.

It's important to decide what part of your IT organization is responsible for managing and securing your heterogeneous devices. You'll want to resist the urge to silo your IT team by manufacturer. Instead, divide responsibilities to best enable your employees with the technology they prefer.

5. Do what's right for your employees.

Since your IT role is about transforming the way your company works so employees can be more productive and satisfied, it will be up to you to determine all of the details. Now that Apple devices can be distributed to employees with zero-touch deployment, you can configure and manage policies and applications over the air with even greater control over each device. The remarkable thing about this is, it allows users to quickly become productive, within 10-15 minutes of receiving their new device.

These days, the companies that don't give their employees device choice are seen as laggards. This goes beyond the technologies, and is really more about giving your employees the flexibility they desire, seamless experience they need and the freedom to choose whatever devices make them happiest and most productive at work.

WWT's successful device choice program

It may be helpful to know that we're not just preaching the talk, we're also walking the walk.

The situation: A few years ago, we decided to adopt company-wide employee device choice at WWT. We already had a BYOD policy, but didn't have an effective way to manage the data and applications on those devices.
The solution: After rethinking our situation and weighing our management options, we settled on the VMware solution, Workspace ONE.
The results: It didn't take long to discover this single solution easily covered all of the device types we needed to manage, including SCCM, JAMF, ServiceNow, SharePoint, Android Play and the Apple Application Store.

Other benefits of our VMware Workspace ONE integration included:

Instituted security policies across all devices, which helped eliminate human error that can exist between platforms.
End users could now request licensing and/or access local, web and virtual applications from one intuitive catalog, regardless of which supported device they were using.
IT administrators were provided a scalable and vastly improved management experience. All applications, profiles, configurations and updates could now be deployed from a single console versus various tools.
User permissions could also be more rigorously monitored and controlled.
Customized scheduled reporting and custom dashboards would better track the WWT environment in the areas of OS updates, application usage and security vulnerabilities.
Access to real-time, automated data helped to vastly improve consistency in asset tracking overall.

With the implementation of Workspace ONE, we have successfully positioned ourselves for the future of device management. Paired with tools such as Microsoft's Auto Pilot, Apple's Device Enrollment Program and Samsung Knox, we're dedicated to providing a seamless out of box experience to our employees.

References

"What Employers Should Have Learned from the Great Resignation," Entrepreneur, August 1, 2022.
"Employee Choice Guide for IT," Apple at Work, Apple Inc., 2018.
"Employee Experience and Customer Experience—What is the Connection?" IDC, September, 2021
"From Texting to Tweeting: Tech-Savvy Millennials Changing the Way We Work," business.com, June, 2022.
Millennials Shaping the Workplace, Great Place to Work, accessed August, 2022.