Across The Memory Board – How To Educate Our Employees On The Best IT Practices

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | Employee Training | Across The Memory Board- How To Educate Our Employees On The Best IT Practices

Cybersecurity is one of those overriding concerns in modern business. As there are more data breaches making headlines affecting a wide variety of companies, it seems that nobody is exempt from cyber terrorism or crime relating to technology. This means it’s crucial for you to look at your vulnerabilities. While you can set up various types of systems to protect your company, one of the most vulnerable areas of your business isn’t a technical one, it is a human one. Your employees are prone to human error. And we’ve got to make sure that we train our employees to understand the best practices of IT. What sort of tactics and practices can help you in this situation?

Investing In Employee Training

From a technical perspective, we can outsource components to a network services company or IT specialist, so they have the responsibility, but when we look at our in house components, it’s crucial for employees to grasp cybersecurity as a maintenance issue rather than something that they learn once in a blue moon. We’ve got to remember that cyber terrorism is a constantly evolving entity, which means that we’ve got to upregulate our systems and our approach to protecting the company. While we can invest in components like software patches and outsourcing technical duties to another company, we still have to invest in the people that we see each and every day. We have got to commit to a wide variety of tactics, so our teams know what is out there and what they can do to combat it. Partly we have to invest in training, but we’ve also got to change our mindset. It’s so easy to blame the employee that opens the phishing scam attachment rather than addressing the mentality of the employees in general. This is where training becomes essential.

Working On The Best Practices

It’s so easy for us to say that password security is an essential component because everybody knows to an extent this can protect most of us from phishing scams or cyber-attacks. But getting your team to do this is an entirely different ballpark. Working on the best practices with something like changing passwords is partly to do with your employees, knowing the traits of a strong password, but also understanding the outcome of not following these processes. On a basic level, a password needs to be long with multiple characters, and it’s changed on a regular basis. But remember that in order to ensure compliance from your workers, building a reminder to change passwords through regular feedback as well as password management tools can help your employees to keep on top of these issues.

Focus On Cybersecurity Awareness

The people in the IT department may know the sorts of data breaches out there but you can’t expect your employees to follow the trends in the news. You may know which way the signs are going, but it can still prove challenging to understand how regularly these things occur. There are numerous resources that you can take advantage of that provide detailed information on the latest cybersecurity breaches, but you also need to remember that this message needs to be loud and clear. Distributing this information through your team is about consistency. If you continue to share the information on a regular basis, along with the repercussions, this puts the message across. At the same time, you don’t want to bombard your employees with too much information that they don’t bother reading it.

Integrate Cybersecurity With New Employees

The onboarding process is the perfect opportunity to introduce your employees to the best practices. If you incorporate it into your training process from day one, you are able to go over the rules but also explain the importance of these best practices. Again, it’s about reiterating how much of a threat data breaches are. You need to create clear cybersecurity guidelines through important regulatory documents but also initiate a complaints procedure should a breach occur. When your employees hear about a potential breach, you must create an environment where employees share information rather than trying to cover up their mistakes.

Implement It From The Top Down

From the perspective of the executives, communicating the need for regular training in terms of cybersecurity practices is about highlighting its effect on the bottom line. Yes, there is no shortage of news relating to data breaches, but you’ve still got to make a case for it when money is tight. Looking for an executive buy-in is about making your case clear with regards to the costs but also going in with a comprehensive plan as to how the training would be undertaken. It’s also crucial to point out the costs of a data breach. Based on experience, once you highlight how more expensive a data breach is in comparison to training and onboarding practices, it’s likely executives will opt for the latter.

Implementing Regular Drills

We test the fire alarm on a regular basis, so why don’t we incorporate data breaches? When we train employees on a new piece of software, there comes a time where we have to let them fly by themselves. Allowing them to experiment in an environment with their new skills gives you a clearer picture of the potential problems that can occur and if your employees are ready to deal with them. Testing your business with a live-fire simulation can be a massive undertaking, but you can do it through smaller simulations like spot-checking your employees to see if they know the principles of combating a phishing scam email.

As technology is such a major investment and the fact that we rely on it to do 95% of our tasks, we need to make sure that our employees know how to use it properly. Many organizations invest in sophisticated equipment but don’t have the means to operate it. When our employees need to understand how to use the equipment, we can guide them, but we’ve also got to give them knowledge of the best practices underneath. Cybersecurity is such an important issue that if we communicate it so much, our employees can switch off. But by following a few of these processes, you can start to educate everybody across the board.

Do Team-Building Activities At Work Have To Be Boring?

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Entrepreneurship | Talent Management | Do Team-Building Activities At Work Have To Be Boring?It’s a new year and it’s time for another long hard look at your employees. What did they do that you liked or hated last year? Were there arguments among managers? Were junior employees left without leadership? Were there petty squabbles among employees that set deadlines back? Now is the perfect time of year to bring more cohesion to your workforce. From top to bottom, your employees need to forget about last year’s fights and look forward to the future together. It’s vital that your workforce remains a solid team so you can grow even larger and more successful than the previous decade. Yet, you may not have the time or the budget to take employees out on a day of team-building activities. It’s still possible to have them indoors at your office?

A personal piece

Inform your employees that you’re going to be holding a show and tell activity tomorrow. Instruct them to bring something along that matters to them a great deal, or has had a huge impact on them. Employees will sit in a circle and you’ll go around the room asking each person to show that special item. This is to evoke an image of who an employee is outside of work. Sharing something personal about yourself with colleagues will help you to understand why they are the type of person they are. It allows colleagues to feel more connected with the people they work with for 8 hours a day. The aim is to increase the bond between employees and therefore increase cooperation and productivity.

Futuristic racing

Move all the desks and chairs out of the way and call in TLC to set up their team drone racing challenge. They set up neon glowing bars that have been intricately shaped differently to present a gateway challenge. Entering the gates with a drone will be like reaching a checkpoint. You need to complete a set amount of laps in the first place to be declared the winning team. It’s fun, building friendships and isn’t dangerous at all. The courses can be set up within the size of a medium-sized room, so clearing a whole floor will be more than enough room. Employees have to work together as it’s two versus two affairs. You have to avoid bumping into each other while trying to block the other team’s drones on the circuit.

Scavenger hunt

Group your workers into pairs of four. One team will need to hide one item of each member’s workstation around the entire office. The other team will need to find these items. From a humble pencil holder to a keyboard, anything can be used as a prop. The team on the scavenger hunt is given a couple of minutes to find everything before returning to the starting point before the clock runs out. It takes cooperation and effective communication between colleagues, otherwise, they won’t be able to cover the most amount of ground in the shortest amount of time.

Team-building activities don’t have to be extravagant, they can be done right in the office. Futuristic drone racing is incredibly good fun and something employees won’t forget easily.

Automation as a Means of Increasing Human Potential: Which Traits and Skills Will Automation Help Promote in Human Workers?

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StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | AUTOMATION AS A MEANS OF INCREASING HUMAN POTENTIAL: WHICH TRAITS AND SKILLS WILL AUTOMATION HELP PROMOTE IN HUMAN WORKERS?Automation will not replace jobs outright but augment and enhance them by streamlining and simplifying certain repetitive or low-value tasks. In the case of the machine operator, manual labor and routine tasks are most likely to be automated, while management, team-building, employee training and production supervision may now find themselves moved into priority roles. Likewise, our professional’s routine and computational tasks may find themselves automated, making room for other priorities like management, employee development and technology upskilling.

When used properly, automation doesn’t kill jobs; it rearranges their structure. And in the most outcome-driven scenarios, it improves their structure by creating more opportunities for human workers to focus on high-value tasks that cannot be automated.

Another way to look at automation is as a time-creation engine: automation manufactures time. Every man-hour it takes on is a man-hour gained. That man-hour can be subtracted from a company’s balance sheet and treated as a cost savings, or it can be reassigned to a high-value task that could not, until then, be budgeted for. Thus, each man-hour assigned to a machine creates an additional man-hour that can be assigned to a capable, high-value human worker. When we mentioned that automation should be additive rather than subtractive, this is what we mean: a hundred man-hours freed by an effective use of automation could be treated as a cost saving, but doesn’t it make more sense to maximize the value of that gain in one hundred man-hours, and reinvest it in the company? Apply it to solving a problem, improving a system, building a new revenue stream, designing the next killer app?

The lowest hanging fruit in the business world is finding ways to cut costs. This isn’t to say that running a lean organization doesn’t have its advantages. Cutting costs and trimming fat in ways that ultimately help companies perform better are always wins. But the reflex to cut costs just because you can isn’t necessarily the best way to drive towards market leadership. Sometimes, re-tasking resources from low-value to high-value tasks makes more sense than throwing them away.

A case in point: digital transformation, technology disruption and the monumental task of rebuilding businesses for a 21st-century digital economy are not the types of challenges that companies can hope to address successfully by cutting costs and cutting corners. Smart, agile companies know how to unlock their own parts and move them around at will. They are modular. Job descriptions and departments evolve. IT managers at these companies aren’t operating the way they were 10 years ago or 5 years ago, or even a year ago. Every aspect of the business is in a state of constant change and adaptation. Automation for these types of companies, which are typically digital leaders, isn’t used to shrink the number of employees. It is used to free up capital to hire more people, and free up human workers to focus on more high-value and meaningful tasks.

About the Authors

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Olivier BlanchardStrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Daniel NewmanThis article is adapted from HUMAN/MACHINE: The Future Of Our Partnership With Machines by Daniel Newman & Olivier Blanchard. Daniel is the principal analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Oliver is a senior analyst with Futurum Research, where he focuses on the impact of emerging and disruptive technologies.

For more information please visit https://www.koganpage.com/product/human-machine-9780749484248

Four Qualities You Want in a Potential Employee

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article | Talent Management | Hiring | Entrepreneurship | Four Qualities You Want in a Potential EmployeeIf you are involved in the hiring process for your company, you are very likely wise to the fact that searching for and hiring a new employee is no easy task. Along with the pressure of making sure you fill a vacancy in a timely manner, comes the task of sifting through hundreds, maybe thousands of applications to find the ideal candidates.

There are also times when the number of candidates you consider inhibits your ability to pinpoint exactly what qualities would best be suited towards the position that you are looking to fill.

Here are four specific qualities that you should look for when conducting your search for your ideal employee.

1. Excellent Communication Skills

The ability to communicate well, both in speech and the written word, sounds as though it should be a given quality in every candidate. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. It is important that you confirm that the individuals you employ can hold their own when it comes to communication.

The last thing you want to do is to set yourself up to have an employee who is unable to appropriately handle internal communications. If your company is like most others, the day-to-day success of your operation involves many moving parts. From office memos to updates on various projects, it is critical that all those involved have the ability to communicate clearly and concisely.

Additionally, if the position you are hoping to fill is one that involves any aspect of client contact, it would be less than ideal to have someone in that position who is unable to adequately communicate with your customers.

For a more specific idea of the communication skills that you should be keeping an eye out for, check out this comprehensive list that the experts at Habits for Wellbeing put together.

2. Advanced Degrees

Not only does the fact that your potential employee has an advanced degree demonstrate a certain level of commitment to the industry in which you both work, but it also shows that this individual has the ability to learn and improve. Furthermore, it also indicates that they have a desire to continue to do both of those things.

Depending on the type of business that you are in, there are particular degrees that seem particularly appealing to employers. Generally speaking, if someone has an MBA, for example, that means that the person you are considering has spent time developing critical skills that will come in handy in the business world.

Don’t be deterred by a candidate who has earned their degree in a less traditional manner, either. More and more students are earning their advanced degrees online, for instance. Prominent and accredited schools like Suffolk University Online MBA can be trusted to have properly educated those who go through their programs.

3. The Right Attitude

The right employee should also come with the right attitude. Remember, this person is going to become a part of your company. You might be in a situation where you will be working side by side with this individual, and in that case, you don’t want to hire someone whose attitude doesn’t fit the bill or your company.

On the other hand, you might be filling a position in another department from yours. In that instance, you want to avoid any potential for future friction amongst other employees.

There are also certain characteristics that tend to make for a good employee no matter what line of work you are in. Does this person seem like they have ambition? Are they positive-minded and pleasant to be around? All of these things are important to consider particularly when you are in the interviewing part of the hiring process.

4. Staying Potential

The last thing you want is to fast-forward to six months from now only to find yourself having to fill the exact same position once again. It is important to find someone who is in it for the long haul. This simply comes down to asking for an honest estimation of the candidate’s dedication to the job you are offering.

Does this person have any long-term plans that might inhibit their ability to stick around? Do they have all the skills that it takes to be a success in this position? If not, you might risk that person falling short of fulfilling all the duties that the job requires of them. In that case, they might be the ones ultimately deciding that it isn’t a good fit.

How To Create A Productive Office

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StrategyDriven Talent Management ArticleSometimes it’s hard to stay focused when you’re at work, especially if you’re inside a stifling office space on a warm day. Of course, you’d always rather be somewhere else than at work, but what you can do is make your working environment more appealing, more fun, and a productive place to be. If you’re an office manager and you’re considering making changes to the place in order to boost productivity, then your first port of call should be to ask your staff members. Once you’ve got a good idea of what needs changing, and you’ve assessed the suggestions, you can then get to work.

Refurbish

If your office space is looking outdated and is showing signs of wear and tear, then now is the time to consider a complete refurbishment. As long as your budget permits it, gut the entire office in favor of new flooring, freshly painted walls throughout, new and improved desks and chairs, and a reworking of the oppressive overhead lights. Pile the accumulated waste into a dumpster provided by a Dumpster rental Phoenix, so that it can be disposed of responsibly. Clean out your office and strip it back to basics to rebuild an attractive and productive environment.

Encourage Socialization

When it comes to decorating, try and create communal spaces that encourage your team to talk to each other and build relationships. When designing the staffroom, opt for large long couches so that the team has to be convivial and sit next to one another. Prepare group work, and ask that small teams work together to create a final result. Praise the teams for their effort and consideration of others.

Improve Air Quality

Without proper air ventilation, it’s very easy to become unfocused, tired, and to overheat – all of which aren’t going to help your team in trying to be as productive as possible. So, install new ventilation units if the current ones are somewhat lackluster, and keep plants in every available space throughout the premises. After all, not many people object to flowers, fresh greens, and other plants that keep the air clean. Having said this, always makes sure to ask about allergies before adding foliage around the office.

Offer Tea And Coffee

If you work in an office, you’ll understand the importance of caffeinated beverages to power you through the morning. Recognize that your team work hard to achieve their targets and reach their goals, so help them along the way and offer free coffee and tea whenever they might be in need of a pick-me-up. Create an inclusive, friendly environment for your employees, and you might just find that productivity increases tenfold.

Have An Open Door Policy

Your employees need to know that they can approach you whenever they need to discuss something. So, with this in mind, consider operating an open door policy whereby you’re on hand whenever the need arises. Tell your staff that you care about their welfare, their opinion, and possible suggestions about how the office is run and how the company performs. If your team know that you’re there to offer assistance and help them, then they should feel more relaxed, understood, and willing to work hard.