Make Sure Your Staff Understands the Importance of Their Role in Your Organization’s Cybersecurity

Today, employees have to be a major part of every business’ cybersecurity attempts. The reasoning is simple: attacks are more likely to come in the form of end user correspondence than on a direct assault of the network. As a result, it is important that cybersecurity is more than just another line item on a task list, it has to be built into the culture. Let’s discuss a few ways to get your employees to care about cybersecurity.

Why Is Cybersecurity A Nuisance?

This is not a new phenomenon. Your employees want to be productive. In their minds, any extra tasks that are assigned are a hindrance to that aim. Cybersecurity, in today’s businesses, also has a tendency to intrude on their desire to separate their home life from their work life. While this isn’t really the case in most scenarios, there certainly needs to be some cooperation from them to properly secure your network. 

By now your workers understand that security is extremely important. What they don’t understand is how it is their problem. You hire them to do a job, and for most of them, that job isn’t "security guard." That’s why it is important that cybersecurity is something they are confronted with from the beginning of their employment. It is a culture issue, not just an operational one. Let’s go through some ways you can get your staff to care about cybersecurity.

Remove the Red Tape

Today, a well-executed hack or social engineering attempt can completely devastate a business. In some cases, and this is especially true for smaller businesses, a hack can cause the closure of a business. Those types of events affect more than just the business owners or the stakeholders. 

To ensure that your staff gets just how important this issue is, level with them. You don’t need to keep the threats a secret any longer. A unified approach to cybersecurity requires that your employees know how hackers and scammers will go about trying to trick them into handing over access to the company network. This will not only actively remove the indifference most employees have about cybersecurity, but it will also ensure that they realize how important doing the right things are. 

Make Sure Your Staff is Personally Invested

For the average employee, any indifference they have about a business’ cybersecurity efforts comes from the idea that it doesn’t really have any effect on them. This is not true. Hackers don’t just want access to business information, they want access to the network. That means all of the data on that network. 

Making sure that employees understand that it’s just not company information, it is their personal information and that of their contemporaries. Reminding that their data is at stake might just be the thing needed to get them to take security measures seriously. 

Build Solid Training and Literacy Right Into Your Culture

As we mentioned above, one of the best ways to ensure that your staff understands their role in your organization’s cybersecurity plan is to build it into your culture. To do this, it has to be out in front. You need to mention it in your hiring process (interview, any collateral you use to outline employee responsibilities), it needs to be parsed out properly in your organization’s documentation (employee handbook, etc.), and it has to be something that every person in the business knows that they will be confronted with at some point.

Ensuring that your people don’t get complacent is a massive point of emphasis if you want to keep their cybersecurity literacy ongoing. On top of training, you need to keep up some type of consistent reminder that they are important to organizational efforts to keep hackers and other unauthorized entities off of the business’ network. The more time and effort you put into planning out your cybersecurity training, the more that people will get out of it. 

We Can Help!

Keeping your business from falling victim to a cyberattack takes a lot of effort. Our security professionals are constantly readying ourselves to assist our clients in keeping them free of threats and a lot of that is helping them come up with policies, procedures, and strategies to keep their employees engaged in this never-ending fight against hackers. Give us a call at 301-571-5040 today to learn how we can help you protect your business.