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For many, looking after your company will consist of being a personable individual, always with the door open and an open attitude to your employees. This is a great approach to take, but in being open in every sense of the word will leave you open to many things, some things that are worse than the trust you crave. In fact, so many people in an organization will never act with the best of intentions, and they will be the first to leave the company in dire straits. While trust is a vital component, protection is even more so. If you protect your business from every angle, from the tech to the personal, it means that you are maintaining a great line of defense. This should be at the front of your mind whenever you are making a big change in the organization, from scaling up, to letting go of an employee. But how can we do this, and what consists of “total protection?”
Phase One: The Employees
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Helping your employees to work with efficiency and skill is essential to the development of any company. We teach our staff skills they can implement on a daily basis, and this helps to keep the company maintaining quality output. But what we should be teaching is a sense of self-sufficiency. Instead of dishing out orders and asking people to follow them, we should be deploying the right working practices. For example, the ability to spot someone committing the act of fraud might not be the top of your priority list when it comes to upskilling your staff, but this is something you, as the leader, would and should be acutely aware of. And by teaching the warning signs to your employees, via interactive workshops, you can promote a much wider net of knowledge in preventing fraud. Something like the protection of sensitive data is best understood by giving each of your workers an inherent knowledge of how best to protect the information using their own skills. Self-sufficiency is a far more essential tool now, as businesses expand and teams are harder to manage, so by encouraging people to develop their own knowledge rather than rely on their leaders, it benefits you, and it benefits the company. You are encouraging free-thinkers rather than followers, and this is a far more organic approach to building a line of defense.
Phase Two: The Tech
Tech is constantly evolving, and with each passing month is a new way to infiltrate a system and to steal reams of sensitive data. Being innovative with your methods is the best way to make your organization thrive on the protection front. There are many antivirus programs and firewalls, and these should all be part and parcel of your tech setup. The big issue for many is the budget, but there are simple security methods you can use. If your company is just starting out, money might be tight, but if you are dealing with important data, and that data is stolen, you will pay a lot more money in fines! A tech budget needs to form part of your overall financial structure because your business is completely reliant on it. Without this, your business will go down the tubes. Being a bit more sophisticated in your security methods doesn’t have to break the bank, but it can involve a bit more personal security. The standard approaches include changing passwords on a regular basis, running scans on a Friday night before leaving, and one simple thing, ID badges! If you have an ID badge with a strip that you can scan, you can see on a database who is in the building at any one time. Once the budget increases, you can get much into more sophisticated methods. Security cameras with intercom or communication capabilities can be set up by a lot of electrical companies like Electrical Connection, and you can find Electrical Connection here, and upgrade systems as and when you need it. The big factor in introducing better security will mean your company can implement better methods of protection, keeping your employees and your data, secure.
Phase Three: Yourself
Last, but definitely not least it’s you that needs to get into the habit of protection and precaution. You are the leader of the company, and you dictate the standards set. The phrase “lead by example” comes to mind, and it’s an old saying, but it’s a very salient one when it comes to developing security strategies. You can teach employees how to look after certain items of information, or you can dish out information every week, but will people listen to it if you don’t bother? The real reason companies leave themselves open to protection issues is because they aren’t operating with one vital thing, communication. And it’s a massive cliché, but many businesses are now operating with a more holistic approach to their staff. But you need to set a precedent. How you lead and how you practice what you preach should set an example for everyone else. It’s very easy for a lot of leaders to adopt the “do what I say, not as I do” approach to business. This helps nobody because it makes for a very incoherent organization. Communication should be a constant, and this is developed by a better sense of unity with your employees. You are leading a company, and you need to promote this idea of protection because it’s vital, yet if you aren’t doing this, you’re sending out the wrong message to your employees.
Protection is a human value, yet we are very reliant on tech to do the job for us. It is an essential part, but the other two parts are just as important. By implementing the three different areas, from yourself to the tech and getting your staff to be more self-sufficient, you will secure the future of your business; you will have a secure and protected business; and you will be secure in the knowledge that you are doing everything in your power to look after your company.
Co-founder of zenruption
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