MSPNetworks Blog

More than ever, it is important for your employees to have positive work experiences. People have many more resources to find new work today, and with so many people willing to find the “right fit” it can be quite expensive for organizations. While the best way is always to compensate people well, if you are facing a situation where you need to be creative to keep your people around, we have three suggestions. 

Just How Expensive is a High Turnover Rate?

You may not think that the process of hiring and training new employees has a large price tag, but if you consider that new employees are going to be much less productive as they get up to speed (if they do), it’s probably going to cost you more than you’d like to onboard new talent. Some studies have put this number at 1-to-1.5 times the position’s salary for a worker that has been with your organization for five years. This number increases the more responsibilities the employee has. That’s a lot of money to spend just to get a fraction of the productivity. 

Suggestions to Help You Build Positive Work Experiences

We should preface this with a fact: You’re not always going to please everyone. Having a couple of people that are questionable (or bad) fits for your business jump ship is going to happen. That said, there are some things that an organization can do to make their workers’ experience more meaningful. Here are a few:

Set a Clear Mission and Stick to It

One of the most frustrating things for employees at any business is when things take huge shifts without much notice. That includes hiring/firing people, operational changes, and policies and procedures that are not well thought out or enforced. This is not just an employee/employer problem, this is an organizational problem. For the good of your business, identify your organization’s long term goals and don’t change them. Sure, you will have to alter some things in the short term to react to market changes, but overall, the people that work for you should know what all their time and effort is being used for. 

Embrace People’s Ideas

No one knows your business better than the people that work on it. You might find problems with this, but the whole picture can be painted by your staff if you just listen. By giving your employees a voice, you will gain more insight than you could ever hope to through analytics. They not only will give you their perspective in regard to their jobs, they will also let you know about the inefficiencies that keep them from being as productive as they’d like. People typically like to be a part of something special, so the more they are involved in the overall process that goes into decision making, the more positively they will view their work experience. 

Encourage Work Relationships

We’re not talking about encouraging your workers to date, but there is no reason your workers can’t be friends. Without a doubt, people want to work alongside people they respect and like. Of course, co-workers are always hit or miss. The more a business can create situations where friendships and relationships can develop, the more actual teamwork you are going to have. Some of the best ways to do this is to conduct personality assessments and then try to assign work that will have like-minded people working with each other. Not all people will fit together, but for the most part the more people can relate to their co-workers the more their work will be improved and the happier they will be working alongside their peers. This is an indispensable thing in a workplace where a lot of things are boiled down to dollars and cents. 

Your business is not just your products and your services. It is all the people that make up the ability to fulfill your customer’s needs. At MSPNetworks, we can help build the technology that can help foster positive work relationships and keep your employees working for you. Give us a call today at (516) 403-9001 to learn more. 

Every business has different types of workers; often to management’s chagrin. Ideally, all of an organization’s workers would be enthusiastic about their jobs and the status of a business as a whole. Unfortunately, people don’t always have like minds about the state of things and can see their morale reduced and their productivity wane. 

Keeping your people engaged does more than build a more productive business; it saves money. Recruiting and onboarding new talent is extraordinarily expensive and time consuming, so retaining the talent you acquire is all the more important.

There are a few things any business can do to engage their employees a little better and get them to feel a little more invested, even if they work remotely. Let’s take a look at a few

Promote Work/Life Balance

In order for your business to find success, your people have to work, that is undeniable. Ironically, the best way for people to find the focus at work is to have a solid work/life balance. Today’s businesses tend to have workforces that are much more distributed than businesses of the past, and that can wreak havoc on a business’ ability to promote a dedicated company culture. It can also cause workers to work longer hours, which encourages the overwhelming pressure that business is all around them all the time, a major contributor to burnout. 

There are plenty of ways that an organization can assist their employees improve their work/life balance. They include:

• Value productivity over time - One of the biggest problems managers cause is looking at the amount of time that an employee works rather than what they do in the time that they work. As we stated before, your business needs productivity, they don’t necessarily rely on employees to put in workweeks that run counterproductive to their mental well-being. 
• Encourage breaks - When you are busy, work can get difficult to get away from. Encouraging your staff to take breaks to get away from the work for a little bit not only gives them a respite from the grind, but will give them a chance to use their phones, because you know they are going to. 
• Paid time off - Most places require a business to provide some paid time off, but the more paid time that you can provide your staff, the more they can enjoy their lives outside of the workplace. Having five days of sick/vacation time is nice, but having more allows people to take a vacation, manage their outside life better; and, the better they are at that, the more effective they will be at work.  

Gamify the Workplace

One of the best ways to get superior employee engagement is to gamify your workplace. This is really a hit with the younger workforce. The theory behind gamification is that if you give everything your team does a points system and then give out prizes for the employees that produce the best work, you will get people competing for those prizes and the whole lot of work will improve. Here are three benefits to gamifying your workplace:

Improve Engagement

Part of boosting morale is improving engagement, and nothing gets people’s productive juices flowing quite as much as an open competition. The more fun a person can have while doing work, the more engaged with that work they will be. 

Recognize Excellence

A big problem that many workers have at work is that they can excel at their job and it is completely taken for granted. By gamifying your workplace, the employees that are doing the most to push your business’ initiatives forward will presumably rank high on the gamification leaderboard. This not only gives top performers the recognition they deserve, it also can work to make a lot of internal business decisions simpler. 

Improve Efficiency

When people compete for prizes, they tend to do their best to win those prizes. This means that more will get done faster. This improved efficiency is great for your business as it can speed business up and create holistic growth. The more efficient a business is, the more productive it is. The more productive a business is, the better the business performs. 

When in Doubt, Pay Better

This might be the last thing a business owner wants to hear, but this is one of the leading reasons that an employee will look for another job. If you want to avoid that, pizza parties and pats on the back will only go so far—you need to pay them competitively.

If you would like more information about how technology can be used to improve your business and help build a more productive, fun, and engaging work environment, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001.

Remote work has been growing for years, but as it becomes more commonplace it becomes more difficult for business owners and managers to ascertain how engaged a remote employee is. This week, we thought we’d discuss a couple of ways that you can keep your remote employees engaged and productive. 

Engagement is More Than Production

The first thing you have to understand about remote employees is that most of them do better work faster from the comfort of their own homes than they do from an office. It’s just the fact that people take less time to do something productive when they don’t have to factor in all the other variables that come into play when they leave their house. 

Another thing that you have to understand is that a remote worker has much more to distract them from work than workers that work in an office. Which is why it may seem like they are a little less productive, even if they are meeting their key performance indicators (KPIs) and meeting their deadlines. 

This all translates to a very confusing situation. Let’s take a look at three tips that can help you keep your remote workers engaged.:

You Still Need Culture

Your company culture is more than the free coffee and donuts (or beer) you provide, it is the way that your business treats its employees. When building a team of remote workers this can be kind of pushed aside for more practical decision making, but it is still extremely important to keep your team as engaged as you want them to be. Shared goals and interests connect people and encourage better work and communication.

One tip that can help you keep building your company culture is to have some fun on your collaboration tool or instant messaging platform. If you set up a “just for fun” channel where your team can communicate, share stories, memes, jokes and more, you will see more engagement out of the team members that need that sort of thing while they work remotely. Another tip could be to set up optional meet-ups such as a happy hour or a virtual meeting at the end of the week so people can interact with team members they may not come into contact with in the execution of their work. The more “normal” you can make working from home, the more productive and comfortable your team will be. 

Get the Right Tools

Remote workers depend on the software you provide them, so it stands to reason that the most engaged remote workers will have access to software that makes this a priority. There are a wide range of different technologies available today that can create close working conditions for remote workers. Whether it's collaboration software, video conferencing, or simply just a well-tested instant messaging platform, your remote teams will be better off if they have access to tools that make collaboration easier and communication less of a chore. 

Provide Emotional Feedback and Support

One often overlooked part of working from home are the pressures that come from the home. Some people can handle them a lot better than others. Proper organization communication is the most effective way to keep remote employees engaged, while also helping managers have a substantial effect on their motivation and productivity. No matter where you work from, you want to know that the company you work for sees you as an individual and not just a number on the end of a VoIP channel.

You’ll want to maintain regular communication with your remote employees, provide timely and constructive feedback, give them goals to achieve and establish a level of trust that makes them want to be engaged and productive. 

Having remote employees may not always be easy, but the more it becomes commonplace, the more managers need to understand that it’s not the same as working from an office. If you would like to talk to one of our consultants about getting the technology your remote team needs to help build engagement and be as productive as they can, give MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

Cyberattacks can cost businesses a lot of money. They’re also more prevalent today than ever before. It seems you can’t go a couple of news cycles without hearing about some organization that has been hacked or scammed and it’s resulted in the sensitive data the organization holds being sold online, vast operational downtime, or worse. For this reason, many organizations have deliberately built up their cybersecurity infrastructure, enhanced their policies, and invested in training to ensure that they aren’t the next victim. Unfortunately, this attention doesn’t always work. 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has found that cyberattacks increased about 400 percent from 2019 to 2020. Doing what you can to keep your organization’s computing resources secure is extremely important. The cybersecurity outlays made by businesses and other organizations have been immense, and that has led to a sobering reality. Most of any organization’s security problems, especially relating to malware deployment, is due to their employees’ lack of conscientious decision-making when faced with problematic situations. 

It doesn’t matter how much more secure or how much smarter you make your organization’s information system security, it can all be for naught if one employee doesn’t do what they should. This is extremely frustrating for IT people, since it is one of their core responsibilities to keep these systems secure. Let’s take a look at how employees fail to keep their credentials secure and what you can do to remedy this worrisome trend. 

Employees as Attack Vectors

Increasingly, workplace strategies have been altered significantly. In fact, millions of workers are currently working remotely now, effectively distributing a business’ operational network. For the IT professional who is in tune with the current threat landscape, workers that don’t do everything they can to protect organizational data and infrastructure are typically viewed as ignorant; or worse yet, as a saboteur. Unfortunately for everyone, the driving factor is not negligence or a willingness to do their organization harm, it is out of workplace stress, a factor that is difficult to quantify, and harder yet to eliminate. 

A study conducted by the Harvard Business Review found some interesting results about the role stress plays in maintaining their assumed role in protecting their organization’s cybersecurity. The study found that two-of-every-three workers failed to fully adhere to organizational cybersecurity policies at least once in the 10 workdays where the study was conducted. During the study, it was found that employees simply ignore the cybersecurity policies around five percent of the time. This may not seem like a lot, but if you consider that it only takes one non-compliant action to result in a major data breach, having dozens of such instances happen each day is putting organizations in jeopardy. 

You may be asking yourself, “If they follow procedure 19 times out of 20, why don’t they follow it that other time?” Well this is where this seemingly clear issue gets cloudy. The study got the answer to this question. The top three were:

• “To better accomplish tasks for my job.”
• “To get something I needed.”
• “To help others get their work done.”

In fact, of all the respondents, 85 percent that were non-compliant to their organizational cybersecurity policies responded with one of these three answers. These employees knowingly broke the rules and in doing so put their organization in jeopardy, but not because they were lazy or they just had it, it was because that was the only way they could efficiently get the work done. Situations where a person is damned if they do and damned if they don’t, they tend to pick the priority. 

To most workers, they weren't hired as cybersecurity professionals; they are hired to do a job and if cybersecurity policy gets in the way, they will choose productivity over security every time. If you consider that only three percent of policy breaches were acts of true defiance or sabotage, the 97 percent of the rest are likely perpetuated by dutiful employees. It’s hard to justify stern reprimand for a person who thinks they have the business’ best interests in mind.

Redefining the Importance of Cybersecurity

For the average employee, following procedure is typically going to be a distant second to maintaining productivity. After all, there are very few instances over time where someone was labeled as “great at their job” because they didn’t accidentally start a cyberattack. Moreover, most organizations’ IT support team can’t really give people the benefit of the doubt; most employees that don’t follow security procedures are looked on as negligent or deliberately working against their best efforts. The truth is most training platforms and policies (as they are known to the employee) don’t take into account that there are gray areas that don’t line up with the expectations put on employees by their managers. 

To this end, it is more important than ever for employees to be involved in the creation and development of workable cybersecurity policies that take into account that business moves fast and sometimes a person that is focused on doing the best job they can, isn’t going to be focused on maintaining network security. Managers also need to ensure the members of their team know what they need to do and what those actions accomplish to reinforce the importance of their cybersecurity efforts. 

Most businesses celebrate employees that excel at their jobs. Today, their job is actively changing and they have to know why straying from procedure is a major problem. The problem is that one wrong move and the company is dealing with malware and reputation troubles, and loss of revenue. While it might be ridiculous to celebrate adherence to corporate cybersecurity policies, people have had cake for less.

If your business needs help balancing productivity with their cybersecurity policies, give the IT security professionals at MSPNetworks a call today at (516) 403-9001. 

Getting your staff to care about your organizational network and data security may be more difficult than you might think, but it’s not a lost cause. Today, keeping your business’ organizational security strong relies heavily on your staff’s willingness to follow the right practices, so today we thought we’d give you seven tips to get your people to care about security

Be Up Front

One of the main reasons employees don’t often care about cybersecurity is the overt secrecy surrounding it. Today’s organization needs to come clean when it comes to the constant threats that are out there. If you want your people to have a vested interest in keeping your business’ information systems and data secure, you need to level with them. After all, they can’t help if they don’t understand.

Make it a Personal Investment

Your company holds a lot of your employees personal data. Let them know that along with any sensitive and proprietary data that could be lost in a data breach, that their data could also be vulnerable. In order to sufficiently secure your data and theirs, they need to know what’s at stake if they don’t actively follow cybersecurity procedures.

Top Down Security

Every member of your organization needs to understand that they could be targeted by hackers and fall victim to these threats. The more your employees understand that management is actively complying with security policies, the more willing they will be to alter the way they consider cybersecurity.

Gamify Your Process

People tend to be more engaged when there is incentive baked into a policy. Gamification is the strategy of scoring a person based on their efforts. This strategy works wonders for productivity so it stands to reason that it would work for cybersecurity awareness and following any organizational policy that’s in place to keep your systems and data secure. 

Standardize Procedure

One of the most important variables to get your people to follow the rules, is to have them in place to begin with. In cybersecurity, confusion can be a huge albatross, so ensuring that everyone is playing with the same rulebook is a must. This includes building procedures to handle attacks such as phishing as well as password hygiene and many other security-based policies. The more consistent your procedures are, the more likely your staff is to understand and follow them. 

Start from Day One

With all the threats that are out there at the moment, you will want to stress the importance of cybersecurity with current and new employees, alike. If you start hammering home the importance of compliance with security procedures from the day an employee starts at your business, the more likely they will continue to comply with them as they undertake their job; which for most of your staff, isn’t strictly cybersecurity. 

Keep Training

Security training is becoming commonplace at almost every organization, largely because the threats that it faces could have devastating consequences. You will want to invest in comprehensive training and re-training to ensure that your employees understand the importance of your cybersecurity initiatives, and that they are up-to-date on any and all changes to policy or strategy. 

Cybersecurity is a team effort today and if your organization isn’t stressing the importance of it, it’s only a matter of time until it rears its head. If you would like to learn more about training your employees on the best practices of cybersecurity,  creating a cybersecurity policy that works to keep your information systems secure, or if you would just like to talk to one of our IT professionals about cybersecurity best practices and procedures, give us a call today at (516) 403-9001.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it no small amount of uncertainty, including amongst business owners who were looking at a very up-in-the-air future. With so many lacking the technology needed to support remote operations—never mind the fact that remote work was a new concept for so many—the learning curve was a considerable hurdle. However, with vaccines being administered and restrictions lifted, it now becomes critical to find a balance.

How Work Needs to Shift

Despite many business owners resisting remote work on principle, it quickly became the only viable option for some organizations to remain open. Most of these businesses and their owners will want to return to the way things were before—but this may not be practical for some time, if ever. A study has revealed that more than 70 percent of employees who needed to suddenly shift to remote operations are hoping to see some of this flexibility carry over—even though half of these employees are also waiting to return to the office with anticipation.

While this may seem strangely counterintuitive, that much is to be expected.

The ongoing global health crisis turned most of the world on its head, including many impressions about remote work. While the escape of sorts from the office may have initially been a welcome change, the reality of the home environment and its additional responsibilities soon set in. While these employees don’t necessarily want to rush back into the office completely, remote work hasn’t agreed with them as well as may have been expected.

This experience has not been consistent for everyone, either.

Many business leaders are having a far easier time than their subordinates are, simply because of the disconnect that often occurs in remote work setups. In an office, it is much easier to pick up on the trend when someone is having a hard time. When a team is working remotely, these kinds of issues become more difficult to detect.

So, to compare…

Decision makers are earning more, enjoying their time more, and are more flexible in their work as they operate remotely, while the people they’ve hired are often overworked, unappreciated, and simultaneously abandoned while being told that a “familial work atmosphere” is important.

Poorly Managed Remote Operations Also Breed Stagnation

Your employees aren’t the only ones who will have a tough time with poorly-planned remote operations—your entire business could potentially see some drawbacks. Operating out of a centralized, shared location just makes it more convenient for team members to collaborate, which increases the quality of their communications and decision making.

Meanwhile, a year’s worth of remote conferencing has many people sick of it, just doing as much work as they need to so it can be considered “done.” In other words, without the face-to-face interaction of the office, many employees might become complacent.

In turn, the business could become complacent as well.

Making the Hybrid Office Work

Let’s look to the (hopefully) near future, when the restrictions that many businesses are subject to can be relaxed somewhat. Naturally, businesses are going to want their team members to come back at optimum productivity, operating from the place of business once again. Some people look forward to this, others, not quite so much.

As a result, many businesses will likely adopt a more hybrid approach to work, allowing greater access to remote work. Sounds pretty good, but it isn’t that simple.

There are a lot of questions that you’ll have to answer to do this. For instance, how many days will each team member be required to come into the office? One study polled executives to reveal that 68 percent of them would like to see their teams in-house at least three days out of each workweek. Workers conversely placed the maximum requirement at three days per week, with each employee’s responsibilities factoring into their requirement.

Globally, there is also a vast difference in how urgent in-office operations seem to different countries. In the U.S., 22 percent of executives see a return to the office as a priority. Similar companies in Canada, Germany, Japan, and China disagree, with fewer than five percent agreeing.

Unfortunately, the only thing that’s certain about this kind of hybrid work model is how uncertain we are about any of it. How will it impact the many metrics that a business is concerned about—from its culture to its productivity to its employee retention? What is the best option?

Frankly, there isn’t any single correct answer, simply because each business has its own unique situation.

MSPNetworks is here to help you balance out your business’ situation with IT tools and solutions so that your team members can perform the way you need them to. Give us a call at (516) 403-9001 to find out what we can do for you.

It seems as though every business is depending more and more on their IT. This means that their employees have more exposure to their IT systems. Unfortunately, that relationship is where the majority of the problems you will have are. The facts are that any business that has built a strong security policy has the solutions in place to keep direct infiltration from happening. Hackers have to find another way.

To make this happen, scammers create and send billions of phishing emails (and other messages) each day. Some of them will inevitably hit your company’s email. Even if you use the built-in firewall, the vast majority of them will be sent to spam. If you’ve outfitted your system with an enterprise spam blocker, your staff will see even less yet. Unfortunately, however, eventually one will make its way into an inbox. Sometimes the person is targeted directly and sometimes it’s just misfortune, but regardless of the variables surrounding these messages, interacting with one will very likely be problematic for your business.

This is why you spend so much time and money developing procedures, training your staff, and testing their aptitude: to be confident that they know what to do if they encounter problematic situations. Sometimes the attacks are very complex, but more often than not, all it takes is decoding, discarding, and reporting a hazardous message for them to be an actual hero. If your staff is highly trained, it will become just another part of their job. That’s the goal.

Of course, that’s not always the case. In fact, in one study, 77 percent of IT professionals feel as though their companies are unprepared to confront today’s most prevalent security challenges. That number has to scare you a little bit. Fortunately for business owners, IT professionals are notoriously pessimistic about the ability of people to make the right choices. The truth is that breaches do happen and they can be separated into three categories: mistakes, negligence, and sabotage. 

If you are going to be a company that is prepared for the threats that are going to come your way, you need to understand the difference. 

Mistakes 

Mistakes happen. They always have and they always will. People who are normally diligent, hardworking, and good at their jobs can make a decision that is simply wrong. As we mentioned earlier, there are literally billions of phishing emails sent per day, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you, your best employees, even your IT provider can mistakenly click on a link that opens up Pandora's box. If someone makes a mistake, immediately reports it, and it’s obvious there was no malice behind it, it’s really hard to come down on that individual too harshly. A mistake is a mistake, after all. You will want to retrain that person and test them to ensure that they understand what their responsibilities are, but ultimately isolated incidents should be met with understanding.

Negligence

On the other hand, if an employee continues to make mistakes regularly, it’s probably a matter of negligence. Obviously, negligent behavior shows that the employee is ambivalent to the rules set forth by the decision makers and is a problem when it comes to organizational network security. An employee that doesn’t take his/her training seriously probably isn’t taking many other aspects of his/her job seriously, either. Negligence is the cause of a majority of the cybersecurity problems that businesses are forced to confront, and cannot be allowed to undermine the organization.

Sabotage

Sometimes work relationships fail. There are a plethora of reasons why this happens, but most people have run into problems with a coworker, direct supervisor, or employer at some point in their work history. Sometimes the relationship gets so tainted that one party will look to undermine the other. Sabotage is when a current or former employee deliberately undermines the continuity of a business. Sabotage is criminal and purposeful. It can be something as simple as deleting files from a project or smashing company property, and it can be as complex as embezzlement and selling trade secrets to the competition. Most sabotage happens as a result of a work relationship that has turned sour. Unfortunately, if the saboteur still works for your company, you may not be able to catch him/her before it’s too late, but many of them are disgruntled ex-employees who for whatever reason still have access to company systems. For this reason, it is important that as soon as someone is let go or leaves the company, that their access to company resources is eliminated. Someone who knows where things are on your business’ network can really do a number. Avoid that fate by closing that door.

Cybersecurity is a complex issue with many facets. Make sure your business has all the resources it needs to protect your digital assets. Call the IT experts at MSPNetworks today at (516) 403-9001 to learn more.