How clearly outlined are your IT-related policies and procedures in the workplace? It is difficult at best to manage these expectations alongside your employees, but it’s a necessary task all the same. Today, we want to help your organization walk the fine line between protecting your assets, data, and reputation, and granting your employees permissions to do what they must on your network infrastructure.
Here are three standout practices that can help you police your IT policies and procedures without going too overboard and incurring the wrath of your team.
You can only expect your team to follow policies if they know they exist. After all, it’s hard to comply with something if it’s not apparent that the expectation is there. Ensuring that you make clarity and transparency a priority will increase the likelihood that your team will be compliant with your efforts to police policies and procedures. Everyone should clearly understand your policies; this includes employees, technicians, managers, and other stakeholders in your organization.
It’s not really a very fun topic to bring up, but all companies need to be monitoring the technology used throughout the workday to ensure it is being used in a way that is compliant with your security and productivity standards. It’s also equally important to conduct audits to see how devices are being used and if it is in line with established policies. A Unified Threat Management tool can help your business block certain types of harmful or wasteful content that employees might find themselves accessing if left to their own devices. You can also take this one step further and implement whitelisting and blacklisting for applications based on the user, allowing you to take action when needed without making decisions that could impact more than just a singular problem employee.
Once you have your policies and procedures ironed out, as well as how you are going to enforce them, it’s time to train your team on how to remain in compliance. More often than not, understanding why rules exist will be in your favor, as your employees will be more likely to buy into something that they understand. If you train your team and reinforce that training over time, you’ll be less likely to experience serious infractions of the rules you have established for your network and other business technology.
At the end of the day, everyone has a responsibility to protect the business they work for, as the organization's success is directly tied to how secure that business is. First Column IT can ensure that your IT policies are made as transparent and effective as possible. To learn more, call us at (571) 470-5594.
