Every individual on your team should prioritize cybersecurity, deliberately dedicating attention to the habits and practices that could render them, and the business as a whole, vulnerable. Unfortunately, most people in your organization don’t think actively about cyber security unless explicitly told that they have to. They aren’t particularly motivated to follow best practices for cyber security, and they may not even know what those best practices are.
What measures can you take at the organizational level to get your employees to take cybersecurity seriously?
Why Cybersecurity Is Everyone’s Issue
Everyone in your organization needs to prioritize cybersecurity. There are several reasons for this.
First, and perhaps most importantly, the nature of cyber security makes it so that even a single weak link within your organization can render your organization catastrophically vulnerable. For example, if a single employee plugs in a foreign USB drive, opens a suspicious email attachment, or voluntarily gives their password to someone asking for it on the phone, a nefarious third party could gain total access to some of your most sensitive internal systems.
Second, your employees should function as a sort of decentralized monitoring network. If your employees are taking cybersecurity seriously, they’ll be able to notice and flag potential security risks, so they can forward those risks to the appropriate department and help the organization become more resilient.
So how can you make sure that everyone in your organization takes cybersecurity as seriously as they should?
Education and Training
One of the most critical strategies is to provide thorough education and training to all your employees. There are several ways that you can approach this, such as by hosting individual workshops and seminars, distributing information via email, or even mentoring people individually if they seem to be struggling with the fundamentals.
In any case, you can’t expect employees to follow best practices for cybersecurity, and you can’t expect them to prioritize cybersecurity, unless you’ve given them a good reason. Sometimes, people underestimate just how devastating a security vulnerability can be – or how much your organization implicitly depends on cybersecurity for its existential integrity.
Good Leadership
Leadership has an unparalleled influence on your organizational culture. Your leaders are responsible for perpetuating and reinforcing the cultural norms that drive your business forward. They’re often responsible for educating and training your employees. They’re certainly responsible for managing and supervising your employees, and they probably interact with them on a daily basis.
If you can appoint good leaders who all take cybersecurity seriously, you’ll have a much easier time keeping your employees actively interested in the topic. Organizational culture tends to flow from the top down, so with better leaders in place, everything becomes much more streamlined.
Mandatory Options and Settings
You can take your employees out of the equation in some ways by creating mandatory options and settings. For example, you can make it a requirement that everyone has automatically updating software, so you never have to worry about employees choosing to delay those updates. You can also mandate things like multifactor authentication, email attachment scanning, and more.
Do keep in mind that this is no excuse for neglecting education and training. Even if you have mandatory security protocols in place that happen automatically, employees should be aware of them and understand why they’re important.
Incentives for Good Habits
In some organizations, it’s beneficial to offer incentives and rewards for good habits. For example, if someone goes for a prescribed length of time without any security issues, following all best practices, consider making them eligible for a special award. You may even offer organization-wide celebrations for hitting certain milestones.
Penalties for Bad Habits
About half of people will plug a totally foreign USB drive into their work computer, given the opportunity. It’s an unfortunate reality that many organizations have to deal with. There will always be some portion of your workforce that you can’t predict or control, but you can discourage these types of bad behaviors by imposing penalties for bad habits. For example, you can have your IT department send out a fake phishing email – and penalize people who fall for it by making them attend a re-education seminar.
Periodic Reminders
Even security conscious, educated people sometimes forget about important fundamentals. Accordingly, you should issue periodic reminders about important best practices and cybersecurity principles.
Ongoing Adjustments
Even with these strategies in place, you may struggle to keep your team educated and motivated to preserve cybersecurity in your organization. Accordingly, you should also anticipate and prepare for ongoing adjustments in your cybersecurity strategy.
Cybersecurity deserves to be taken seriously by everyone in your organization. As long as you’re willing to invest time and money in this initiative, you should be able to inspire your most critical team members to take action.
