Does Your Arts Org Employer Provide A Company Cell Phone?

While doing some due diligence on a new business cellular provider (more on that in a few weeks), I found myself wondering how many arts orgs provide one or more group of employees with a company cell phone. As such, let’s see what we can find out.

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Among for-profit businesses, this is a fairly common practice but it is rather hit and miss for arts orgs. Even that varies from one country to the next.

Adaptistration People 196Case in point, when I was working for the Qatar Foundation in 2008 as the lead consultant responsible for developing a comprehensive organizational and operational model, the foundation insisted on providing each employee, both admin and musician, with a cell phone and calling plan.

Consequently, that item didn’t need to be included in the larger comparison of arts organization models, so I never found out if there is any particular global trend, especially among artist employees.

In the US, the majority of arts employers don’t even provide artist employees with business cards so it shouldn’t be surprising to discover if most do not provide a company cell phone. For small and mid-budget size organizations, the cost alone would be prohibitive but for larger budget groups, there’s a great deal of benefit to be had form a uniform communication platform and single point of contact.

As such, I’m curious to see where this topic leads.

Does your organization provide cell phone and/or subsidized cellular plans for both administrative and arts employees? If so, I’d love to hear about it.

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

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