The annual State of the Sector survey reveals an increase in employees using personal devices to access business content.

The survey conducted by Gatehouse, a leading internal communications and employee engagement agency, showed that almost 40 percent of international companies allowed employees to access business information from their own personal devices, and 60 percent when including business owned mobiles.

Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is, “often viewed publicly as the IT department’s responsibility” says Simon Wright, co-director at Gatehouse. However, he adds “for this type of connectivity to be truly effective, it is essential that employee engagement is at the heart of it.”

However, surprisingly, an increase in BYOD has not hindered the use of print or face-to-face communications, with large scale employee events and the use of canvassing with posters and flyers shown to have also increased during the last year.

The survey, which included the views of more than 150 organisations with national, European and global points of activity, showed that the use of social media as an internal communications tool is also lacking.

More than 40% of those surveyed commented that their organisation’s use of social media was limited. 15% of those surveyed believing that their business’ use of social media was non-existent, and only 16% of companies had created an app solely for the purpose of employee usage.

To summarise, despite the rise of BYOD in businesses, email is still the main internal communications tool used by employees.