Employees foot the whole bill at 50% of BYOD companies

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In a survey of 100 companies, Good Technology found that at 50 percent of companies with BYOD policies, employees fully pay for their devices and service plans.

The rest of companies with BYOD policies offer employees some kind of compensation for their mobile costs. Twenty-four percent of the companies offer a stipend toward service and device costs and 19 percent let eligible employees expense their costs. Seven percent pay for the device but no service fees.

The findings are nearly identical to the results from Good's survey a year ago.

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Good isn't drawing any conclusions about whether or not the BYOD trend is causing a change in how much companies are paying for employee cell phone costs these days.

"It really depends on the company and its specific objectives for its BYOD program," said John Herrema, senior vice president of corporate strategy for Good Technology. Good is seeing some companies use BYOD as a way to reduce their spending on mobility, he said. Others are using BYOD to get more employees connected and while they may share some of the costs with employees, those companies are often spending more overall on mobility. "We are seeing more companies consciously increase their mobility spending to boost productivity, responsiveness, and competitiveness," he said.

In last year's survey, Good looked at the impact cost had on mobile adoption, finding that companies that offer a stipend have higher adoption rates. But Good didn't include similar data for comparison in this year's report.

For what it's worth, Samsung recently found pretty different results in a similar survey. Among companies with BYOD policies, it found that 28 percent of the companies paid nothing for employee phones and plans. Samsung found that 39 percent of the companies formally paid for mobile costs or reimbursed them. Thirty-one percent informally either reimbursed or paid for mobile phone and services.

Regardless of who is paying mobile costs, BYOD is here to stay. Good found that 76 percent of enterprises it surveyed formally support BYOD, up from 72 percent the previous year. And the companies that said they had no plans to support BYOD dropped to 5 percent from 9 percent in the previous year.

It turns out that BYOD is primarily a big company trend, at least among those that Good surveyed. Good found that 46 percent of enterprises that support BYOD have 10,000 or more employees, with 75 percent of those that support BYOD employing 2,000 or more people.

Nancy Gohring is a freelance journalist who has been writing about mobile networks, cloud computing and consumer electronics for more than a decade. Read Nancy's bio