The singer and songwriter Moby wrote, "the good thing about working alone is I get a lot done, and I can experiment more. The bad thing is I miss out on the gregarious, social way that most musicians work." His statement could easily touch a nerve among the millions of gig workers worldwide.
Gig Workers Live by BYOD
Gig work is intrinsically a solo pursuit, whether driving for Uber or working remotely for a call center. But today fortunately, Moby's lament about the downsides of the musician's solo life is, for gig workers, mitigated by CX technologies.
Because with the click of a button, gig workers today from far-flung locations can meet, share, and socialize in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago.
And like musicians who rely on their own instruments, gig workers today rely on a BYOD model to get work done.
And gig workers, especially among Gen Z and Millennials, share something else with musicians. Many work from gig to gig, city to city, embodying a rootless lifestyle, living in one location for a few months and then moving to another.
All this is made possible with mobile and broadband and on-demand collaboration technologies - and BYOD.
And all that raises the stakes that could lead to disastrous cyber breaches.
BYOD Comes with Serious Security Risks
"Security is everything in the gig CX economy," said Gerard Adlum, Head of Content Strategy & External Comms at ThinScale. “The long-term growth and stability of CX gig work is dependent on protecting the operator, their clients, and the employees themselves.”
The barriers to adopting BYOD are low, thanks to cloud collaboration and remote access tools. But once a contract is complete, companies run the risk of confidential data remaining on a gig worker's device.
The ability to wipe that information off those devices remotely is critical, Adlum confirmed. Or better yet, ensure that no customer or corporate data is ever stored on an employee-owned device.
With their iterant lifestyles, short-term projects and ramp-up and ramp-down gigs, it becomes impractical for companies to send gig workers devices such as laptops and company-owned phones.
"The traditional model of providing gig workers with corporate devices is widely inefficient and costly," said Adlum. "You're sending gig workers devices for three months, and then you have to get them back. It isn’t realistic. The most efficient way is BYOD," he explained.