Creating A Positive Workplace Security Culture
To have a positive workplace security culture and to promote optimism within the business, clarity is a must. If your staff doesn’t know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or how any of it ever turns out, then you’re setting a bad tone. Think about it for a second. How did you feel the last time you were given a task with very little direction? Or when you completed a project and you were never informed of where it went or how it performed? Now imagine being told you’re going to do all these extra things to be ‘more secure’.
Odds are, you experienced a mixture of frustration, disgruntlement, and uneasiness. This state of mind can be toxic to your employees. When experienced in long intervals and within large groups of people it can result in a workforce that only does the bare minimum. It can also create a culture of workers without a connection to the work they do.
If you remove the frustration, disgruntlement, and uneasiness, you may not have a great, thriving, positive culture, but you’ll certainly be much further away from a negative one. And that’s always a good thing. Here are a few tips to help you encourage more optimism and a little less negativity.
Provide Direction
If you ask someone to complete a task or a project, make sure you give them enough direction to actually complete the task or project as you expect them to complete it. Some people with more aggressive, dominant personalities tends to pass this up altogether – not because they mean to. They simply don’t think about it. Because of this, it’s important to encourage open communication. Make sure your employees know that it’s acceptable to ask for a little more direction. To minimize some of the back and forth, it can be worth your while to create detailed processes for more repetitive tasks.
Give Meaning
When you’re getting ready to make a big business decision or if you’re handing out projects to employees, you should always find the time to explain the ‘why’ behind it all. Let your staff know why things are happening like they are or how a project fits into the bigger picture. It’s always nice to know that what you’re doing actually means something in the grand scheme of things.
Show Results
If you spent weeks working on a big project and no one ever told you how things turned out, that’s a one-way ticket to zero motivation and no real connections to anything. Put something in place that allows employees to see the fruits of their labors. You could go as far as to establish standard procedures for project follow-up, but even something as insignificant as a passing comment can have more of an impact than you might assume.
Positive Security Culture
When you’re ready to implement the next security project start with educating your employees. Explain to them what the product is and what is intended to solve. Get buy in from your stakeholders before implementing a solution. Give direction and training about how to use it. Keep in mind that your employees may find other uses for the project that may increase scope or productivity. Reward those that come up with innovative ideas. Lastly, be sure to show the employees some results. Maybe there is a metric you can publish. For example, we saw a 43% drop in clicks on phishing emails due to the training we implemented four months ago.
Whatever you choose to implement, keep your employees in the loop. If you need some help or guidance, give us a call.
