Help! My employees are costing me a fortune!

When business managers analyze their expenses, they usually find that employees are their biggest cost. Since this is a fact for most businesses, what are we doing to make our employees as productive as possible? You might consider cutting employee costs to save money, but investing in your employees by training them could help you avoid much bigger costs, here’s how.

Phishing on the rise!

Phishing now is constant. Our employees are bombarded with emails that entice them to click the wrong link or enter their credentials into a scam site. Hackers utilize relevant situations or opportunities to entice someone to click into their snares. For example, getting an email referring to a credit card dispute or a bank balance is bound to raise your employees’ antennas.

Why does phishing work?

• The message uses a sense of urgency to get you to click now.
• The message will imitate a legitimate entity to make you feel it is safe.
• The message will ask you to click a link or open an attachment.

So we get phished, why should we be concerned?

One of the deadliest results of being phished is called ransomware. This is a pernicious tool that will at minimum cost you a lot of time and money, and the worst case could put you out of business. The bad actors literally encrypt all your data and require you to pay them a ransom to obtain the key and be able once again to access your data. You might say that your data is expendable. The hackers have an answer for that as well. If you don’t pay the ransom, they will dox your data which means making it public for the world to see. If you work with financial information or health information, this is not an option for you.

What is the solution? Train them and teach them!

Statistics tell us that from 60% to 80% of hacks are initiated through email. That is where we need to bring all the tools we can to help our employees.

How can we help our employees in this battle? Here are two ways!

1. Train them!
   With an ongoing training program, we can educate our employees to be aware of the dangers lurking in emails.
2. Test them!
   We conduct an ongoing test of your employees by phishing them, sending them test emails to see if they click, and if they do we re-educate them!

As you might recall, this blog started out by discussing cost avoidance and you might ask, how is spending money on my employees cost avoidance? We have all heard the saying you must spend money to make money and probably have seen it applicable to our business.  By spending money to train your employees, you will avoid a potential huge expenditure, one that would make the expense of employee training pale in comparison. Do you remember how the Fram oil filter commercial used to say, “you can pay me now, or pay me later? That training could be just the ticket to help you avoid a horrendous expenditure in the future!