Companies are adopting bring-your-own device programs, where employees use their own personal devices on the job. These programs allow employees to use their device of choice on site—increasing efficiency and nixing the standard one-to-one system where a company needs to own the technology infrastructure from end-to-end.

“There is a move away from the standardized office space that companies have been supplying,” Drew Carter, a studio director at H. Hendy Associates, tells GlobeSt.com. “Companies have supplied standardized computers, software, phones. Today, technology is moving toward an office design where knowledge workers have a better level of control over what they are using and how they are getting their jobs done. It is less prescriptive and more about thinking rather than simply executing tasks.”

Cell phones and mobile devices are the gateway for this strategy, and most employees would prefer to use their own phone. “We have gotten so used to blending our cell phones between our personal life and our work life, and that device is now becoming more general. Employees get their emails on their own device now,” Anna Alm-Grayhek, studio director at Hendy, tells GlobeSt.com.

Using a model where employees use their own devices is about increasing communication rather than controlling technology. “In the past, the only way that a company could guarantee that an employee had a way to community was to own that infrastructure from end to end,” says Carter. “Today, they don’t need to do that. They can design how their people are going to work together, and that is informing the physical design of the space.”