Unknown: Yes, you should monitor your workers at home, but not
because you don't trust them. Alright, this is an article from
The Guardian, I'm going to react to this one. If you're loving
our reaction series, give me a thumbs up. And I would love to
share with you what's in this bad boy.
I've been sent an article from The Guardian to react to, which
is about monitoring your remote workers. And we have a remote
team, we've been running a remote team for a long time, we
help businesses set up and scale remote teams, we help businesses
systemize, organize and scale their companies using Google
workspace, a number of other technology tools. And so we'd
love to geek out about remote management, remote teams, and
how it all works together, and especially when technology is
involved. So I look forward to seeing what's in this article.
Now we've all switched to this remote working reality during
the pandemic. And we were actually running a remote team
or working from home for a long time before that happened about
five or six years. And then when the pandemic happened, and
everyone was sent home and fired up a Zoom account and tried to
keep working the way they were working previously, we started
to notice some of the wheels falling off. And so we've done a
lot of work on this channel and inside our free genius Academy
to teach businesses How to Adopt to a new way of working. Now
this article is talking about cyber crime, and how these
attacks can actually affect your business. And let's see what
they have to say about teams working from home. Now,
according to a recent report by the New York Times eight out of
the 10 largest private US employers are using software and
other technologies to track the productivity of their teams at
office and home. And they are installing software to see how
long people are logged into the computers, how much time they're
spending on work related activities. And you know, even
some people have screenshots and those kinds of things to
actually, you know, track whether or not things are
actually happening. Now, here's the interesting thing about
tracking. We've had lots of questions about that over the
years, because we have a large team based in the Philippines.
And so for most people who are running businesses who, you
know, let's say you're in the US, or you're in Australia, or
you're in the UK, and you want to build outsourced or remote
teams in different countries in different locations,
particularly those who have more favorable pay rates, that you
can get a little bit of arbitrage happening in the
market that you're operating in. Well, many people will come to
us and say, Hey, how should I track my employees? How should I
make sure that anyone who's working remotely for me is
actually productive. And I, I've always been of the opinion that
you shouldn't track people's individual computers for the
work that they are doing. And you should instead set fair
KPIs, monitor them well, and manage your team well with great
leaders and great managers inside your business. So that
you don't have to take the control measure of actually
monitoring what's going on on someone's individual desktop.
Now, obviously, large corporations typically side on
the side of distrust of their employees. And so they're
probably going to be installing things like monitoring software
and things that do like weird screenshots and whatnot. But
that's not necessarily going to solve the problem of poor
employee performance. And it's definitely not going to solve
the problem of employee attentiveness, if your employees
decide that they don't want to work for you. Now, we've known
this for a long time, because we've operated out of the
Philippines, which there is a culture of virtual assistants.
And that culture of virtual assistants will often have
multiple gigs running for multiple people, or there'll be
Moonlighting, where they work for one job during the day, and
then they work for another job. But what tends to happen is
those two jobs can actually start to merge together. And
people are on the payroll for two jobs at the same time, and
billing those two companies for a full day's work. And I
stumbled across just a couple of months ago, a forum called
overwork on Reddit. And that sub community inside Reddit actually
talks about and helps teach people to take on multiple
remote jobs, where you will actually be able to earn
multiple revenues and multiple incomes at the same time as a
remote worker. Now, for those that are in that subreddit, this
is nothing new. It's been happening for a long time. But
I'm really glad to see that this conversation is happening around
productivity of people working at home. Now, personally, I
don't believe in monitoring people's machines. I think if
you've got great KPIs in the business, you shouldn't need to,
and we try and have a culture of openness and respect and
responsibility and trusting our employees instead of trying to
control them. I think that promotes better teamwork. And I
think that promotes better values alignment for your team
as well, when they don't feel like they're being distrusted by
their employer. So what's the justification that these
businesses have for actually monitoring people's computers?
Well, that is so that the company can use the data to
determine productivity levels, and identify Rule Breakers. The
same report also claims that Amazon tracks smartphone
smartphone data for its delivery drivers to monitor their
efficiency and identify unsafe driving practices. Okay, so it
goes on to say surveillance is booming. Sales of employee
monitoring software has gone crazy. They've got some examples
their industry is expected to grow from 498 million to 1.7
billion by 2000.
and 29. And so we're spending a lot of time monitoring people's
productivity. And we're spending a lot of time trying to work out
what people are actually doing on their computers. The article
says you should not be monitoring their productivity
attending, attentiveness or number of clicks, that is a
waste of time and resources, I agree, creates a toxic culture.
I agree. If a below average employees committed to wasting
an employer's time, they'll find a way to do it without you
knowing I Tripoli agree. Your employees are grownups they've
been paid to do what they promised to do. So don't bother
monitoring them for their work. I strongly agree. But the
article goes on to say this doesn't mean you shouldn't be
monitoring them while they're working at home. Why? Because
they're remote employees, and you can still have security
problems. So the report says that the FBI saw a 300% increase
in reported cybercrime attacks since COVID-19. And reduction
and predictions reveal that it is going to be a soft target for
more than half of cybercrime attacks in the next five years.
And I strongly agree with that. And the issue here is that many
people have gone home, and they've logged into their work
stuff on their home computer, and they're now sitting at their
home computer, getting things done. The very scary thing for
employers, if you're a business owner, that means you is that
when someone is working on a computer, or a device that you
don't control the security of can really open up your company
to a lot of risk. And what I mean by that is, let's say for
example, someone's working on a computer in their home. And on
that computer, a crypto like a virus hits, and all of a sudden,
it is synchronizing encrypted files to your Google Drive, and
messing up Google Drive for everyone in your company. Now
that can happen very easily. And there is no just one button
click Undo button inside your Google Drive to actually fix
that problem. And we've had many customers that come to us who
have a complete mess of Google workspace account, that then
means they're not able to get their work done. And if you
don't have a third party backup solution implemented well, it
may take weeks to actually recover from that, as we had one
of our customers who was a law firm with 30 employees find out
because they didn't have a third party backup for the Google
workspace account. They had to restore files in Google Drive
one by one too early at revisions of those files, which
took them literally weeks to get done, and cost them hundreds of
1000s of dollars in lost productivity. Now let's look
into some of the other reasons the article says this is a bad
idea. If you're using older versions of Windows or Apple
iOS, or older routers at home, you may have weak passwords,
software may be out of date, there may be vulnerabilities.
And there are viruses and malware that can particularly
jump in. Now if you're using something like a Chrome device,
a Chromebook or a chrome box, much less likely to have malware
much less likely to have viruses. And that's why I
operate on those right across the business for myself, and for
many of our employees as well. And you can also see here that
employees lack training, we have literally worked with partners,
where we have a product where we can actually send a fake
phishing email out to our customers employees, just to see
whether or not employees will click on it. So if you're
interested in doing a security test inside your company, well,
you might be interested in getting in touch with us to help
facilitate that. But let me tell you, the results are pretty
crazy. Many people will immediately click on something
that comes into their email that looks like a message from a
legitimate bank or from a tax department without actually
checking who the email is from. And that will be another video
for another day. We also click and we download and we browse
and we install things without thinking, Yes, we do. We're
sharing our computers with our kids. Yes, we are, that puts us
in a very vulnerable position. So because of this, we do need
to be monitored, said the article. Note not our
activities. But we do need an IT firm to keep a close look on
each one of your employees to make sure that the computers are
connected. Now, they haven't actually given much of an input
on what you can do on a practical level to actually make
sure that these security holes are sealed up. So I'm gonna give
you a few things that you can actually do to make sure things
are looked after. Number one, device approvals. Very, very
important. You can switch this on inside your Google workspace
account. And device approvals allow you to manually approve
one by one each computer or each device that connects to a new
account inside your Google workspace account. Now why might
that be a good idea? Well, you don't want employees to be willy
nilly installing and getting access to your company data on
any device that they like, if your mobile phone inside a
business doesn't have a passcode attached and someone leaves that
on a train, then someone has access to all of your company
data. If you have a computer that has a virus on it in
someone's home, well then that's potentially going to be
synchronizing encrypted files or corrupted files to your Google
Drive, which is going to impact the productivity of everyone.
And how do you make sure that that's managed? Well, you make
sure that any device that has company data on it actually has
security protocols and processes in place to make sure that it is
well protected and to make sure that you're not going to run
into issues with company data being shared with third parties.
Now what's the absolute worst case scenario in some
Don't think like this happening? Well, if someone gains access to
one of the accounts inside your business, the absolute worst
thing that might happen is they impersonate one of your
employees send you an email, pretend to be a finance manager
and say, Hey, could you just make this transaction to this
supplier, by the end of the day, they've read all your emails,
they've read your Google Drive, they know who your suppliers
are, it sounds like a legitimate email that they're asking for,
or a legitimate bank transfer rather. And in that moment, you
don't know to check the account numbers, you don't know that the
account numbers have been changed to someone else's
account. And you make that transfer bank $10,000 or more is
gone from your business. And unfortunately, we've seen this
happen with our clients over and over again. Second step you can
take is setting two factor authentication, right across
your Google workspace account, you should already have this as
a policy. But if you don't already implement that in the
security features of your account, and that will make sure
that everyone who has a Google account, even if their passwords
are compromised, has a second layer of protection, just in
case something goes wrong. Thirdly, implement mobile device
policies, you can actually switch on Android for Work and
Android enterprise mobile device policies, which allow you to
lock down Android devices. And you can also use iOS policies to
make sure that your iOS devices are locked down to you want to
do things like enable password enforcement making sure that
everyone has a password on their account, and making sure that
their device policy allows you to perform a corporate wipe on
devices as well. A corporate wipe allows you to remove all of
the company data once an employee has finished at your
business. And for the most part, you know, because of using Gmail
and Google Calendar and whatnot, you know, not much data is going
to be left over once you change your password and remove
somebody from their account. But when you do have a corporate
wipe set up inside your mobile device management options, let
you do a clean wipe of all company data. Once an employee
has left your business without touching any of their personal
data on their mobile devices. Next up, you should ensure each
device in your company has some kind of monitoring on that
individual device for things like viruses, malware, spyware,
cryptolocker, viruses, that would be something called end
point management and endpoint management will make sure that
the individual devices are secured. And if there are any
viruses or malware if it's a Mac or if it's PC, that those are
dealt with rapidly, you may choose to have some you know
remote backup run on those machines. That's the kind of
thing that you want to talk to your IT consultant about or have
a chat with us if you're interested in implementing a
policy for that. Finally, if you haven't already considered
switching to Chrome devices, they make all of this super
easy. You can set a simple policy on a Chrome device so
that any files stored on a local computer are automatically
backed up to someone's Google Drive. Chrome devices are very,
very, very protected from malware, spyware, viruses.
cryptolocker is basically don't exist. They are the most secure
operating system that you can use for business. And they are
deeply integrated with the Google workspace ecosystem,
making your life an absolute dream. Now security wise,
they're also fantastic because everyone has to use a Google
account to log into an individual Chrome device,
whether it's a Chromebook, or a chrome box, or any other chrome
based device that you're using. So that means that someone's
login is tied to their Google account. And so if they're
sharing a device with their kids, their kids can log in with
a Gmail address, and they won't be anywhere near the work setup
of your company. Now, if you can't do that, if you haven't
rolled out Chrome devices to your business, if you're on a
Windows machine or a Mac machine at home, where you can do the
simple things like setting up multiple user accounts to make
sure that each person in your business has one dedicated
account for actually getting their work done, separate from
all their kids stuff separate from their partner, and separate
from leaving a computer completely open and unlocked in
your lounge room for anyone to sit down and potentially see
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