Should I let staff use their own devices for work?

The reason a position is needed is that the alternative is unstated and therefore untested. A business with no policy has employees using personal phones for customer correspondence, storing client files on personal laptops, and taking all of it with them when they leave, and nobody agreed to any of that. It happened because it was convenient and nobody addressed it.

The minimum position covers four things and fits on half a page. The device must have a passcode or biometric lock. Business data is accessed through business accounts rather than saved locally where possible. The person tells you promptly if the device is lost or stolen. And on leaving, business accounts are removed and any local copies deleted. That is sufficient for most small businesses.

Prefer access over storage, which is the principle that makes most of this manageable. If work happens in cloud applications through business accounts, then removing the account removes the access, and the device holds very little. The difficult version is somebody with three years of client files in a personal downloads folder, and that situation is created by how the work is arranged rather than by the device.

Understand the practical limits of what you can require. A personal device belongs to the employee, and demanding the ability to wipe it entirely is both intrusive and legally complicated. What is reasonable is controlling the business accounts on it, which most platforms support through their own administration rather than through device management.

Consider paying something toward the cost if you require the use, because that is both fair and clarifying. A modest allowance establishes that this is a work arrangement rather than an assumption, and in some jurisdictions reimbursement for necessary business use of a personal device is an actual requirement rather than a courtesy.

Think about what happens to customer contact specifically, since this is where the real exposure sits. A salesperson whose customer relationships live in their personal phone contacts takes those with them, and the business has no record. Customer information belongs in a business system that the business controls, and personal devices should reach it rather than hold it.

Be careful about employees using personal accounts for business purposes, which is a related and worse problem. Work correspondence in a personal email account, files in personal cloud storage, or messages in a personal application are all outside your control and outside any record you could produce if you needed one.

Then write it down and have people acknowledge it, briefly. This is not a legal exercise and the value is that the expectation exists before something goes wrong, at which point an unstated assumption becomes a disagreement about what everybody thought had been agreed.

Provide the device yourself if the role genuinely requires one, because that removes the entire question along with the negotiation about reimbursement and control. For most first year businesses this applies to very few roles, and where it does the cost is usually lower than the complexity it avoids.

Review the arrangement when somebody leaves rather than only when they join, since that is the moment the policy is actually tested. Confirming that business accounts were removed and local copies deleted takes a conversation, and it is considerably easier while the relationship is still cordial.