IT Services PerthNow you may have good people and think they would never, ever, do such a thing. However, even good people can be lead astray. I’m a firm believer in trusting your team and not putting too many rules and regulations in place. This is often, seen as micromanaging and great team members or employees will not accept or deal with it.

Having said that, you also need to make sure you control what websites your team members and employees visit. Wasting precious work hours browsing news websites and social media is something I have been guilty of in the past when I was working for others. I’m still working on getting better at it, however, have had to find ways to force myself off these websites. They drain the teams and my productive output.

You may be asking how is that possible? Well, every interruption in our day it can take the amount of time on the distraction times by 23 minutes and 15 seconds, to get back to where we were before that interruption. This is a 25X negative impact on you and your team’s productive output. This is directly coming off the bottom line.

Imagine, for a moment, you the equity partner, principal or director of a professional services firm, one of your employees, has been screwing around browsing unrelated websites or social media or shock horror porn on your dollar.

Ask yourself this.

  • Would you be impressed with their lack of productivity?
  • What if you had tasked them with working a very important matter for a very important client who you, personally promised an outcome to and it’s not been done?
  • How would you be feeling then?

I know there are also legitimate reasons you or some of your team may need access.

  • Your marketing and/or business development team will need access to social media for business related activities.
  • You and your team may be involved in criminal or human resources or commercial matters where access to certain sites is required for research purposes.
  • You may want to allow them access during certain hours of the day e.g. Lunch time.

So how do you prevent employees wasting work hours on social media, surfing porn and screwing around?

  • You need to get the culture right in your firm. With the right culture and an engaged team your employees will not be wasting time on social media, surfing porn and screwing around. It goes without saying, you have to lead by example within your firm. Don’t ask others not do something you’re currently doing or willing to do yourself. As one of my mentors likes to say, “The fish rots from the head”.
  • You also need to have in place an advanced next generation firewall that is able to classify not just websites but also internet software as a service applications. This firewall then needs to be configured to only allow access to the websites and software as a service applications needed by you and your team to directly do your work. Naturally, there are certain website categories you want to block outright including Porn, malicious websites and range of others that are unnecessary distractions to you your team. Unfortunately, hackers and cyber criminals are compromising legitimate websites hourly, and using them to host their various phishing campaigns and act as the brains for their nefarious operations. The only way to prevent you and your team falling victim to this is with an advanced next generation firewall using what’s known as website filtering that classifies sites and then allows us, your IT services company to block access to the bad ones.
  • Obviously, you want to work with an IT Services company with extensive cyber security experience that understands the impact the websites and software as a service applications can have on your organisation and which ones are relevant and those that are not. Naturally, and It goes without saying, there must be ongoing IT and cyber security services that are configured in a multi layered approach across all your IT systems either in house, in the cloud or a hybrid system. The services must have guaranteed response times and you must know how long the data is going to be retained for.

Things such as advanced next generation firewalls, cyber security protections and IT systems in general require constant care and maintenance for them to perform at an optimal level. This is not a one and done solution, where you can implement it and then forget about it. Would you buy a car and then never get it serviced by a mechanic at regular intervals?

There are new websites released daily and many of them are malicious in nature. If you don’t have the correct ongoing preventative maintenance in place its likely you or your team will fall victim to these malicious websites and other cyber threats. Alternatively, you’ll have a team that is wasting time browsing websites such as online shopping, job searching, sitting on social media all day or potentially browsing porn which all negatively affects your productive output, revenue and bottom line.

Have questions and want to learn more? Go to https://www.myinfotechpartner.com.au/pylvideo/ and sign up for my FREE 17-minute training video that dives deeper into the cyber security layers you need in place, what great IT services looks like and protecting your legacy, reputation and family’s livelihood.