Worker Reveals Why She Rejected Her Company's Offer For A Free IPhone
There's such a thing as work-life boundaries.
Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels Content creator Ashley Houghton shared an experience that’s common for many corporate employees who are onboarding to a new position, yet she discussed why she refused something her company wanted to provide.
Houghton revealed why she rejected her company’s offer to give her a free, brand-new iPhone.
Houghton sat in her car to record her gentle manifesto against the merging of her private life with her work life.
“I recently started at a new company and I needed to get a work phone,” she explained.
Her company offered to buy her a brand new iPhone 15, which would mesh her personal phone with her work phone.
“My immediate answer was, ‘Absolutely not,’” she shared, saying, “I will have the iPhone 15 to be the work phone and I just won’t use it for my personal use.”
While Houghton preferred having her work phone and her personal phone separate, she noted that the office IT guy commented on her preference.
Photo: Karolina Grabowska / Pexels
He remarked that her decision was “really strange,” since she was one of only two people at the office who chose not to blend their work phone with their personal phone.
“That is so weird to me,” she exclaimed, noting the collapse of personal boundaries. “As if they’re not already spying on you through your computer and like, knowing when you’re active, and things like that,” she continued.
Houghton railed against the idea of having personal texts, photos, and social media accounts integrated into a phone that the company, in essence, owns.
She shared her disbelief that other employees at her workplace have chosen to do exactly that, yet in asking her co-workers about their reasoning, found that most people appreciate the convenience of having everything they need streamlined into one phone.
Houghton took a hard stance against it, saying, “There’s no way you could even pay me to blend my personal phone and my work phone.”
Photo: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
Many people in the comments section shared that there are other concerning reasons not to use your work phone for personal correspondence: If the company is ever involved in a lawsuit, whatever’s on your phone could be used in court, because it’s company property.
While Houghton’s take might seem like it’s veering into conspiracy theory territory, it turns out she’s not actually wrong.
A survey conducted by ResumeBuilder found that many employers still seem wary of their remote employees’ self-discipline, despite an increase in remote jobs, in general.
96% of remote companies use employee monitoring software to spy on their workers. Over 1/3 of companies require their employees to be on a video stream.
97% of the employers surveyed believe that monitoring their employees has increased productivity, yet the existence of that software sparks some employees’ ire: seven out of 10 business leaders reported that they’ve had employees quit because of monitoring.
The use of monitoring software sparks a necessary discussion on the value of privacy in the workplace, and what constitutes an invasion of that privacy.
As workplace cultures have shifted in the past few years, it seems that companies’ levels of trust haven’t remained as open as perhaps they could be. That means employees need to be more vigilant in setting boundaries to ensure a healthy work-life balance and Houghton's suggestion certainly seems like a good place to start.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers social issues, pop culture, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.