Have you just opened your new office building and asked your employees to bid farewell to work-from-home and work from the office premises instead? If the answer is yes, then you as the employer are responsible for the safety and wellbeing of your employees as well.
In other words, you will have to ensure that things inside and (to a great extent) outside the office are safe and well-guarded. While you don’t necessarily have to hire guards and ex-military personnel for the safety of the building and your employees, you can certainly make efficient use of smart gadgets and technology, such as the integration of the id badge security systems, which will ensure that no outsider enters the office building.
You can also encourage employees to keep their PC locked when they are away from it. Also, if one of your employees complains that they have trouble remembering their passwords – you might want to encourage them to use a password manager instead but to never make the mistake of writing their passwords down.
After a meeting or after the work shift is over, make sure that you and all employees clear confidential documents and information from their desks. Encourage everyone to keep their official passwords separate from the passwords on their personal laptops – and never make the mistake of sharing passwords with your co-workers.
If an emergency happens and you need someone else to log into your account, you might want to contact your administrator. Also, the golden rule is to always lock up all of your devices securely once you are ready to leave the office.
While relying on technology and safety devices is mandatory, it is equally important to train your employees regarding office safety as well. Read on to learn about essential office security tips.
More Tips on Cultivating a Secure Office Environment
Apart from keeping things inside the office building safe and secure, you might as well want to expand the horizon of the term “office” and start looking outside the physical building of your office. You might want to see the office wherever you are – or wherever you are, using any equipment from your organization, including an organization-issued cell phone or laptop.
Understanding the Importance of Cyber Safety
In case of any device being used to access official information becomes a movement of the office. In other words, you will want to think about cyber safety – speaking of which, it isn’t limited to technology alone. Information threats bleed everywhere – they bleed onto paper, they bleed on whiteboards, they live in our minds and even become part of our conversations that we might have in the office corridors.
So the secret and sacred information for official use alone isn’t just what is in the emails and in your employees’ emails – it is the conversations you have and the things that can be overheard.
Contain Written & Spoken Information Properly
It is also the things that get printed out on paper and not shredded or disposed of properly. It is also the information written on whiteboards – that could then be easily picked up by visitors to your office. However, leaked information can also be in the form of pictures posted on social media.
The thing about information is that it likes to flow, and your employees and you have to realize that it is your job to contain information appropriately.
Beware Social Engineering
Also, we are living in an interesting time where we massively depend on technology, and potential cyber criminals try to hack into the computer systems of smaller and bigger companies – over and over again. Now, if they fail to enter a company’s technology and fail to access sensitive data, they might choose the other route, which is all about social engineering.
By using social engineering, potential hackers can trick you and your employees into giving them the information – or clicking on an email link or downloading malware to your computer. You will have to be extremely aware of your responsibility to report things that seem like they could be potential threats.
You must ensure that everyone from your employees is on the same page and reports anything and everything that looks like a threat. You might want to integrate the “see something, say something” rule and ensure that your office security remains intact.
