Why A Safer Workplace Isn’t Just About Security

There’s really no secret to creating a safer and more secure workplace.

It’s all about security awareness.

If you posed the following questions to your employees: 1.) Who are potential threats? and 2.) What are we protecting?, what kind of answers would they provide?

Your employees and building occupants – from temporary staff to visitors – have a responsibility to be mindful of situations that could damage the integrity of your company. Without taking the proper precautions and considering important security protocols, employees might cause losses for your business by compromising corporate data, from company information to individuals’ personal information and other critical business assets.

But these situations might also pertain to physical security, and it’s your responsibility to educate employees on the various ways in which they might increase risk of intrusion, theft or worse.

Creating A Culture Of Awareness

Giving your employees the information they need to answer the above questions is the basis of any security awareness program.

Below are elements of successful programs to consider when creating, implementing and sustaining your own program:

1. Creating A Security Awareness Program

• What compliance or audit standards must you abide by?
• What are the overall organizational goals?
• What are the current security risks and are those risks accounted for in the current security policy?
• What falls within the scope of the security awareness program (i.e., what information remains strictly in the hands of in-house/remote security team members and what information is disseminated to other departments)?
• Who should be part of the security awareness team and what will their training content consist of?

Hints:

• Training should be role-based and targeted with additional training as needed.
• The shortest training with the greatest impact is the most effective.
• Encourage better performance through ongoing and annual training.

2. Implementing Security Awareness

• Who is responsible for producing the training materials outlined in the creation stage?
• What is the measure of success for passing the training program? How are results communicated to employees?
• What is the best method of communication for security awareness training materials?

Hints:

• Create tracking methods to monitor the training progress of individual employees and leverage additional training as necessary.
• Enlist the help of upper management to enforce and encourage security awareness and training participation.

3. Sustaining Security Awareness

• When is the interval for reviewing the security awareness program and who is responsible for its review?
• Have any changes been made in your security policy that should be reflected in the new training?
• How is performance being tracked and reported by employee and as an entire organization?

Hints:

• Compile staff feedback on the effectiveness of training materials, usefulness of the program and changes to make going forward.
• Develop a security awareness training checklist to ensure your team has done their due diligence in the creation and implementation of the program.

The proper security awareness program strengthens the technology within your business security solution. But without the proper program, you stand to lose the ground gained through recent and future security investments.

Creating a safer workplace reaches beyond security and into the realm of organizational stability. The more your employees know, the more invested they become in business goals, whether in protecting premises and corporate data or advancing the overall mission.

Assess the strength of your current security solution with assistance from true security professionals.

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