Strategies for Balancing Work and Life While Maintaining Cybersecurity
In the hustle and bustle of this world, maintaining a work-life balance seems to be a privilege to many. A 9 to 5 job where you have to work five days a week only leaves you with a few hours a day to live your life freely – unless you have a long list of chores that you must complete when you get home. With this kind of lifestyle, it’s easy to neglect certain aspects of our lives – one being cybersecurity.
The digital world that we live in today – while accessible – has also made it more difficult to stay safe from cyber attacks. Cybercriminals have never been more cunning and victims have never been more gullible as these attacks seem to increase year after year. And with many businesses leveraging the power of the Internet to drive growth, maintaining cybersecurity is now more important than ever. But the first step to keeping your business safe from cyberattackers is to start with your employees. More specifically, you have to support them in maintaining a work-life balance.
How Can You Balance Work and Life While Maintaining Cybersecurity?
That said, there are a few strategies you can try out to support your employees’ work-life balance while keeping them safe on the Internet. Here’s how you can do that.
Define Boundaries
Just like how tigers leave their scent marks in the jungle to define their territories, strictly defining boundaries when it comes to work and personal life. Sometimes that means not checking your emails while you’re lounging about in the living room watching your favorite TV show. Defining your boundaries also means allocating time for personal activities. As a business owner, placing unnecessary pressure on employees to reply outside working hours can add more to an already-full plate.
Allow them to enjoy their hobbies in their free time. Maybe they want to paint artistic masterpieces à la da Vinci or cook as if they were a Masterchef contestant, engaging in hobbies takes a weight off their shoulders by leaving all work-related thoughts behind. By doing so, the mind is much clearer and you leave time to focus on other things that matter, like cybersecurity.
Consider Their Time Off
One of the biggest secrets to maintaining a work-life balance is taking breaks. Humans aren’t machines, and burnout can get intense – especially when they’ve been waiting to go on that week-long vacation to Hawaii all year. Establish a clear time off policy and communicate it with your employees so they can schedule personal commitments ahead of time. Encouraging them to take some time off is crucial for their physical and mental health as well, which is important to keep them engaged and their performance excellent.
Use Strong Passwords
When you perform security risk assessments, one of the most common vulnerabilities you’ll encounter is your password security. To keep safe from those pesky cyber attackers, it’s best to guard your accounts with strong passwords. Typically, that means using an amalgamation of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols. And it’s good practice to use different passwords for your accounts.
Now, you might be thinking – with such a fast-paced lifestyle, how can one possibly remember all of these passwords when others can’t even remember what they just had for breakfast? It’s simple. Use a password manager. They’re the life-saviors of not only the forgetful ones but also everyone who wants to keep their walls high in defense against cybercriminals. It helps to choose a reliable one so you’re sure that your passwords are in good hands. And, require employees to change their passwords frequently. For instance, let their computer remind them to change their password every 3 months.
Use Two-Factor Authentication
Let’s say a hacker successfully cracks the code and gains access to an employee’s account – once they get a hold of it, there’s nothing much you can do about it. That is, unless you enable two-factor authentication. Adding this extra layer of security foils their seemingly elaborate plans to hack accounts by sending an authentication code to a worker’s personal email or mobile number.
And if the employees follow the previous step of using different, strong passwords for their accounts, there’s a high chance that the attackers haven’t gained access to other accounts. That’s why enabling this is crucial. While everyone may want to gain access to their accounts quickly especially because we’re always on the go, inputting a code from your messages shouldn’t take too much of their time.
Keep Software Updated
If there’s one thing that many computer and mobile users forget, it’s got to be updating their software. You may have received a notification at one point, urging you to update that application. But with such a busy schedule, there might have been a time you might have ignored it.
The point is, software updates are critical to keeping your device safe. As cyber criminals plan their devious schemes, they find new ways to obtain your precious data – and sometimes even your hard-earned funds. A hassle-free way to do this, especially for those who fail to update applications regularly, is to turn on automatic updates on their device. That way, applications are allowed to run in the background while they can go on about their work.
Educate Employees
There’s no better way to talk about cybersecurity than by educating your employees on the subject matter. With the rapidly-changing digital landscape, it’s essential to have a refresher on cybersecurity to keep you and your business safe from malicious attacks. Hold a seminar frequently so you instill the importance of cybersecurity into your employees.
In Conclusion
Maintaining a work-life balance is anything but easy. Performing well at your job, having time for your hobbies, and spending time with your family – it’s the ultimate balancing act. Adding other issues such as cybersecurity adds more weight to an unbalanced scale of work and life.
That’s when your company takes charge. There are many ways to encourage employees to strike that balance while maintaining cybersecurity – from allowing them to define boundaries to educating them on the latest cybersecurity practices. The best part is that this doesn’t just benefit your employees, it benefits your company, too.