Keeping Your Staff Aware of Basic Online Safety

It can be easy to put all of the focus of your business security on increasingly complex firewalls and other systems that can keep equally complex threats at bay. However, turning your sights exclusively on these areas can neglect to address the simpler threats, leading them to slip through the cracks.

As your business grows and you begin to hire more and more people to help you handle the various departments and increasing workload, it becomes equally important that you keep everyone on the same page about security – so that these new openings for threats aren’t exploited.

Outline the Threats

The first step is to detail the threats and why they matter. If you can point to something that should be avoided, that can help to create clear guidelines and boundaries. Your staff needs to know how present these kinds of threats are, but you don’t want the problem to become so nebulous that it loses all meaning. The bottom line here is that you’re trying to increase their knowledge of online safety so that they don’t make mistakes that could play into the hands of these threats, and that creates a boundary to the knowledge that you’re trying to impart.

Dodgy links, suspicious emails, phishing scams, untrustworthy communications – these are what they might encounter more regularly, so that’s what you might want to focus on throughout this.

Inform Their Approach

The exact course of action that you want them to take will be dependent on what exactly they do within your business. Again, if they mainly interact with administrative tasks or communications, it could be risks made apparent through emails and links that they need to concern themselves with the most. However, if they operate more closely with internal operations and coding, they might need to be aware of what a potential vulnerability looks like so that they can inform what the next steps might be.

It comes down to technical knowledge – both in terms of what is expected in the given field and what is needed in order for the next steps to be taken. It’s highly variable, which makes the difficulty of communicating this to staff more apparent – especially when your own knowledge of security might not be as comprehensive as it could be.

How to Communicate This

A simple email or correspondence that goes out to your employees might be an option that you feel gets the message out quickly, but it’s also something that could be easily ignored. Instead, you might think of hosting a meeting where you outline what to look out for and what staff members could do about it – but you need to ensure that the meeting feels punchy and effective or it might be another situation where it’s easy to neglect and half-listen to. Alternatively, you could create eLearning content that provides your staff members with this knowledge before testing them, creating an opportunity for them to potentially remember it better by applying that knowledge themselves.

(Disclaimer: Devdiscourse's journalists were not involved in the production of this article. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of Devdiscourse and Devdiscourse does not claim any responsibility for the same.)