How to Keep Your Business Safe Online
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As the internet becomes ever more important, and more businesses move their operations online, the risks associated with internet security grow. Cybercriminals take advantage of those whose systems are unsecured, and the technology of hacking develops almost as quickly as the technology designed to stop them. And yet it’s impossible to avoid this entirely, particularly with employees working from home and clients interested in remote dealings more than ever. So, how do you keep your business safe online? There are many policies you can implement and systems you can follow to help you and your employees keep your data secure and protected.
Device Policies
Particularly with employees working from home, the risk of your network being compromised is higher than ever. You can mitigate this risk by implementing strict device policies, meaning your employees are prohibited from accessing company databases from their personal computers. It may require startup costs as you supply each individual with a company device, but it ultimately means you can control security across the board and ensure that every access point is equally safe.
Use Expert Solutions
If you’re not technologically minded (or even if you are) you don’t have to muddle your way through alone. There are expert companies that exist purely to help other businesses navigate their internet security. By using this IT support you are availing yourself of experts in their field, who will be able to analyze and monitor your systems, ensuring your protection is up to date and as effective as possible. With this help at your fingertips, why wouldn’t you make use of it?
Passwords
It’s a simple tip, but it’s always worth repeating: keep your passwords secure, and keep them obscure. Passwords composed of names or familiar dates are unbelievably simple for hackers to infiltrate in less than a minute. In contrast, completely random passcodes made up of random letters, numbers, and symbols, and at least twelve characters could take thousands of years for a high-powered computer to solve. Which would you rather have protecting your company data? Keep different passwords for every account you use, and don’t keep any record of them online or on your computer, as these could be hacked as well. It’s also a very good idea to implement a password policy across your staff to ensure there are no weak links in the business.
Verify Documents
Your business will be liable for fraud if it is found that any of the documents are not authentic. Businesses get handed or sent thousands of documents, and it’s important that you can say for sure that they are all genuine. It’s for this reason that businesses have begun to use verifiable credentials to check which documents are and are not real. This protects the business by keeping it safe from this kind of fraudulent behavior, ensuring that you will not be liable for any legal misconduct.
Always Get a Second Opinion
Sometimes the easiest way for a business to be compromised is not through advanced hacking or data breaches but through simple human error. Business to business frauds are more common than you might expect, and the majority of them happen through online channels. If anyone approaches you, or emails you with an offer or anything else that you’re not sure about, take your time to think about it before responding. Don’t guess; get a second opinion from a legal advisor or another business you trust, before even responding, and certainly before opening any attachments as these can carry viruses. It’s always better to be safe than sorry, after all.
How To Get Employees To Print Less
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No matter how many changes you make as a business to try to move towards a paperless office, there will always be someone who doesn’t get on board. Perhaps it’s from habit, or they prefer a physical print-out. Despite this, companies are looking for ways to discourage printing, to reduce the costs of paper, ink, energy and printer wear and tear.
There are lots of steps that businesses start with to reduce printing and move toward a paperless office, including scanning, filing scanned documents, sharing documents on the crowd, and improving efficiency by selling unused ink and toner to Sell Toner. Unfortunately, despite these measures, some people need more encouragement to change their behavior.
Eliminate personal printers. Each printer in the workplace must be stocked with ink and paper, and be maintained. That can add up. Instead, change to a shared printer, but don’t tuck it away in a corner. Keep the printer near the office manager or the person whoever is in charge of maintaining them. People who can be seen printing too often will self-regulate over time.
Have people print their jobs at the printer itself. People often forget that they’ve printed something and print it out again. Use a virtual print queue so the person has to be at the printer before their job will actually be printed, so they have to be there to get it.
Use printer policies. Reduce late-night printing, large print runs, and heavy use of color. Use printer servers and other printer management controls to limit things like this. You could even implement different policies for different levels of the company.
Change the default setting on all the printers from single-sided to double-sided. People won’t think about changing the default before they print, so set all your printers to print double-sided unless specified otherwise. Doing this can save a huge amount of paper. Other useful settings to save ink include grayscale, draft mode, and shrink to fit.
Track individual use of printers. You can use managed print services to monitor the individual use of printers. Printer use often mysteriously drops a lot when use is tracked like this. You can share people’s use stats with them, and the shock of seeing just how much paper they use might encourage them to change their habits.
Use a chargeback system to account for costs. These systems let you assign costs per printers so you can attribute low costs to the efficient printers that you want people to use, and higher costs to the less efficient ones that you don’t want them to use.
Reduce margins and typeface sizes. Smaller fonts and narrower margins mean you can get more content onto one side of the paper, meaning fewer sheets will be needed for printing.
Use thinner paper. Paper comes in many thicknesses. You don’t need quality inkjet or laser paper for everyday printing. Thinner, cheaper paper does the job just fine for most printing tasks within an office and will work in both inkjet and laser printers.
What Are The First Steps To Effective Crisis Leadership?
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Being on unfamiliar territory always presents a challenge to us as business leaders, and there has been no more unexpected challenge than the current global pandemic. Overnight, the future has become uncertain, whole industries have ground to a halt while others have flourished, and nations have had to get used to working from home becoming a new way of life. What the crisis has shown is just how innovative we can be when we need to, adapting our products and services rapidly to meet ‘the new normal’. And it's a fact that while some businesses will be feeling the aftershocks of this for quite some time, others will emerge stronger, leaner and more profitable because of the experience.
Effective Leadership
Those companies that do thrive will tend to have one thing in common - a leader who can guide the organization through the troubles and respond to rapidly fluctuating conditions with one eye still on the future development of their business. So how best do you guide a team and yourself through such an unprecedented situation - and any crisis scenarios in the future?
Assessing Strengths
When the worst happens, the default response is to look externally - how do we stabilize sales, increase marketing, cut back on overheads? And while this is valuable, one of the best leadership development areas you can focus on is also the ability to focus inwards - on the strengths you have that will shape your approach to this challenge, and on the strengths that your team has that you can level at the problem. Great leaders don’t have to have the answer to every problem - they need a mature emotional response that allows them to understand their own limitations. You will get the best results in a crisis from operating within your personal strengths, and getting the right people in areas where you are not so strong. Processes like 360 feedback can be useful for this in understanding how you are viewed within the organization, and you will know yourself what parts of leadership come instinctively and seem to flow, and what areas always feel like more hard work.
Creating A Communication Plan
No matter how much great work is going on behind the scenes, it means little if you do not use effective communication skills to let everyone else involved know what's going on. Creating a stakeholder map allows you to see all the groups and individuals with a vested interest in the health of the company, and it's your role as leader to ensure that they are kept informed in a timely manner of any relevant developments. In a crisis situation, time acts as if compressed. This means taking action sometimes before you have a fully developed picture of the situation. However, it's a mistake to hold off on letting people know what is happening - the void simply gets filled with rumours and misinformation. So it's perfectly okay to acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers yet, as long as you communicate truthfully about what steps you are taking.
Improving Online Security For Your Business
Your online security as a business is something you want to take very seriously as more cybersecurity threats and methods pop up every day to try and catch individuals and businesses out. Whether it’s their data that’s stolen or confidential customer data, it’s important to avoid it at all costs. Here are some tips for improving online safety for your business.
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Strong Passwords Are Essential
Strong passwords are definitely important to maintain when you’re operating a business where various staff members might be accessing data or using payment methods on online accounts on behalf of the business. It can be very easy to make up passwords, but it’s remembering them that’s difficult. It’s good to educate your staff to make sure that they’re not thinking up passwords that are relatable to them or the business in any way. There are programs and software that you can get nowadays though that can certainly help with password security and strength, so it’s worth exploring these and seeing if it’s a better option than letting your staff pick and choose when they update their passwords.
Outsource Additional Security
There are plenty of additional security options that you can add to help strengthen your security. Outsourcing IT services can certainly help to monitor any issues or weak points in your online systems that could lead to potential cyber-attacks. There are solutions like Privileged Access Management which are also worth exploring. The more security you can add to your business, the better.
Scan Your Website For Malware
Malware is one of the most significant issues in online security for modern businesses. Effectively, it refers to dangerous software that can disrupt your entire computer system. Thus, you need to secure your website against these threats. The problem many small businesses face is they don’t actively scan their pages for malware and other viruses - particularly if their site is hosted on platforms like WordPress. Therefore, malware could last for months, slowly eating into your system and compromising your data.
So, you need to have some good antivirus software that constantly operates and scans your website to ensure there are no viruses or malware breaches present.
Make Use Of Two-Step Verification And Use A VPN.
When it comes to adding additional security, it’s important to take full advantage of whatever is available to you to add those extra layers. There are many platforms online that allow you to add two-step verification. This means you add your phone number to the login process and it sends a code straight to your phone to type in before accessing your account. It means that if a password ever gets stolen, you’ve got a second layer of security to hopefully prevent them from gaining access. It’s certainly worth using, especially as these can often be good for protecting email accounts and online banking where necessary.
Also, key to security is using a virtual private network (VPN). A virtual private network extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network, per Wikipedia. When looking for the best VPN for privacy, make sure that the VPN solution meets all the needs of your company.
Train Your Employees
Your employees are an important part of your security, and it’s essential to train your employees where you can. Not every employee is going to be clued up on how to operate online, regardless of age. There are some things about cybersecurity and protecting yourself online that even the most qualified and experienced might not know. It’s something that changes regularly and being up to date can certainly help your business when staff is using the online world on behalf of the business. Train your employees where you can and address any weak points that your staff tells you about.
Improving online security is something that your business should be doing on a regular basis, so use these tips to help improve it as and when you can. Outsource extra security help and keep your data protected.
How Careless Communication Can Kill Your Business
We get it. You’re busy. We’re all busy, and we don’t always pay attention to how we communicate. Fire off an email and move on to the next task. That’s the way we work, that’s the way we get shit done. Problem is, those quick and careless emails can have huge consequences if they are creating problems for your employees.
The way that managers communicate (or miscommunicate) with their employees is almost always problematic, and one of the top triggers around generating resentful and threatened employees.
Here is a really basic rule: when operating in an environment of unequal power, the person with less power requires greater clarity and neutrality in order to maintain a sense of safety. This is human nature. We don’t have to like it, but since we can’t change it, we might as well understand it and ultimately make it work to our advantage.
Poor communication between a manager and employee will increase the stress level for an already over-stressed employee and can create conditions that will push them out of their window of tolerance.
How much unnecessary grief is generated by carelessly written communication? Managers rely almost exclusively on email and memos to communicate with their employees. (Executives do this as well but are far less likely to email employees directly.) The biggest problem with managers’ over-reliance on email really surfaces when the information being disseminated involves an important issue such as an organizational change, new policy implementations, or staffing changes. There is rarely enough clarity provided in an email and no real mechanism for employees to ask questions. If you think that having HR review the email is enough before sending it, think again!
Employees will always interpret the “intent” behind the information being sent to them. Each employee will filter this important announcement through their life stressors, job fantasies, and experience of power in the workplace. Remember, your having power over your employees will always make you suspect. Once they run the email through their own internal “Employee Translation Program” you can bet the information they are left with is a more threatening, destabilizing version of the original.
Pivot Your Work Tasks For A Successful Day
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In the book Getting To Like by Jeremy Goldman (@jeremarketer) and Ali B. Zagat (@alibzagat), the authors talk about the art of the pivot. Basketball fans know that a pivot is used when the player with the basketball can move in any direction to avoid the opponent, by moving with their planted foot on the court.
The book talks about using a pivot as a branding move, to switch from where you are, to where you want to be, career-wise. My example today is how to pivot from one task to another, to make your workday seem orchestrated and easily flow.
My book Avoid Chaos! touches on a variety of things that Not-For-Profit (NFP) leaders face. These issues are not exclusive to the NFP world, but they're more amplified due to the funding challenges that NFPs face.
When you face challenges, wouldn't you like to have control over how you deal with them? Otherwise, you are in constant firefighting mode, and trust me that will grow old (and make you old) pretty fast.
My free e-book on a successful morning (free, if you subscribe to my e-mails) talks about structuring your routines. Pivoting from task to task will also help you in managing your day more effectively.
I'm a big fan of batch processing tasks. It's taken me years to master this, and I still stumble from time to time, as other people's urgency can be hard to filter out from your day. Life moves in rhythm, and so should your day!
As I type this post, I know I have e-mails sitting in my inbox. The old version of me would literally freak out that there's an unread notification on my phone, or in the tab on my browser. I've learned to disable notifications on my phone (Pro Tip: Do that now, please, and come back to this post.)
Now, I let the unread e-mails stay unread until it's time for me to read them. I love e-mail over phone calls because I have greater control over when to address that item. I pivot from using a triage method to review my calendar, to looking at e-mails. If the message requires a response, I do so when I read them. If it requires me to do some additional work or research, such as working out the right sales objection handling response, then I file it in a folder called Priority. If it's an FYI-only type of e-mail, then it goes in there and quite frankly, probably won't be viewed again.
If it's a task that I've completed, then I move the message to complete. I've pivoted the message from new, to one of those 3 categories.
I've experimented with not responding to an e-mail until the next day if I don't feel a response is needed the same day. This requires training your audience to know that you won't respond same day. If the sender requests a quicker response, depending on the request I may respond. I control my response times, not them.
Now if you're dealing with customers, respond fast, and personally. Show you're human.
You can reach out to me on Twitter (@bfastleadership) and let me know how you pivot through your day.