Seven Danger Areas To Watch For In A Hi-Tech World
With new technologies being introduced into your business environment at a dazzling pace, it’s easy to overlook the extent to which the divide between your employees’ work time and their private lives and ambitions is increasingly blurred. Some corporate managers wonder whether they can any longer define where it is. One American CEO recently observed that it’s more like a seismic fault line that’s expanded into an ever-widening corridor.
Here are a number of areas where you need to be aware of what your employees are doing. If you’re not sure how to monitor their activities, call in a team of experienced professionals who are sensitive to the privacy and legal issues sometimes involved. Using sophisticated equipment and new techniques like computer forensics, they will analyse all of your electronic traffic, access to your databases, incoming and outgoing mobile and text communications, business transactions and other relevant dimensions of your corporate operations in order to provide you with a map of what’s really going on. Once that’s established, they can also help you grapple with what needs to be done.
1. The Mobile Employee.
The widespread use of 3G wireless broadband means that much of what used to be done in your office can now be carried out almost anywhere. Smartphones, for example, have all but replaced the need for an office with a fixed line. While BlackBerry has contributed greatly to satisfying our addiction to mobile email, the market for staying connected while you’re out and about has expanded enormously. In a similar way, notebooks are increasingly coming with built-in 3G wireless for internet access on the road. If you have a fair percentage of your staff constantly outside your office you need to know whether you’re getting value for money from them, be it in customer relations terms or through recruiting new clients. Do you have any idea where they are when they’re outside your office? There are ways of checking.
2. The Politically Active Employee.
Be aware of staff members who might be involved in politics (which is their business) but who could be using your system to communicate their views in a way that’s easily traceable to your company. Many corporate emails are clearly marked with your company name and any linkage with certain forms of political activity could impact heavily on your business reputation. Recently in Australia, when an attempt was under way to ‘spill’ the country’s Opposition Leader, politicians on his side engaged in a flurry of Tweeting with journalists and others outside, breaching party room confidentiality. This was a first for a political crisis in Australia, with social media networks taking the general public inside the process in real time. Some of the politicians involved chose a more indirect route, contacting friends in the corporate world and asking them to pass on messages to their media contacts.
You need to know who’s politically active in your company and how they might utilise your system to pursue those interests. A lot could be at stake, particularly if your firm is involved in government contracts. Feelings on issues like climate change may run hot in your office and you should know who’s most likely to be proselytising in a manner that links their strongly held views to your corporate image.
3. The Eternal Shopper.
At this time of the year in many countries a massive shopping splurge is under way and social networking sites will feature like never before. US retailers have already unleashed their traditional post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping promotions. This year, they are reinforcing their efforts with an array of social networking weapons, including Twitter and Facebook. As a company manager, you probably accept that a certain amount of working time will be lost in the hunt for a bargain, whether it’s in the context of Christmas shopping, for some other religious or cultural festival, or just for regular purchases. But is that all there is to it? Are some of your employees shopping on your company account, perhaps not bothering to pay the money back?
Some firms have found that employees are producing their own goods or services, with sales peaking over the holiday period, and they’re running that private business online through your office system. This practice is increasingly common but should be strongly discouraged, not least because it may have legal implications for your firm. A good professional team will know how to identify these patterns of activity within your company’s communications system.
4. The Indulger in Pornography.
You can safely assume that a number of employees are accessing pornography online from your office. But accessing sites is one thing; ordering illegal material, especially relating to paedophilia, is yet another. Communicating with underage children for the purpose of sex is even worse. The staff members concerned may not only find themselves in serious trouble with the law – with all the attendant publicity – but your company could well be implicated, too. Again, a professional team can identify this sort of activity quickly and equip you with the evidence you need when you act.
5. Whistleblowers and Leakers.
Whistleblowing has played a key role in a number of recent high profile scandals, especially on Wall Street. Naturally, you want to know what’s gone wrong in your firm before you learn all about it on the TV news. In many countries, there is little or no protection – and certainly no reward – for whistleblowers, but in the US there is and it acts as a powerful incentive. It’s called the False Claims Act, and a Google search will list legal firms dedicated to acting on behalf of whistleblowers so that they profit from their disclosures. Most cases in America revolve around fraud, and the results have been staggering. The whistleblowers themselves have benefited to the extent of some billions of dollars.
Using a number of sophisticated methods, especially in financial analysis and computer forensics, a professional team can often pre-empt the whistleblower’s honourable cause by identifying where illegal activity is taking place. The same applies to leakers, though the latter often fall into a malevolent category. The key is to act early.
6. The Short-Term Employee.
Older company managers remember the days when employees signed on for a career, or at least for a lengthy period of time, and tended to identify closely with corporate goals and standards. Nowadays, flitting between jobs is commonplace, a practice only somewhat curtailed as a result of rising levels of unemployment in many economies. Watch out for employees who are accessing your databases – with or without permission – in order to download information that will help them move on to another company. In the process, some may be selling your top commercial secrets for personal gain. Others may be exploiting customer relations to select and approach prospective employers.
Again, a professional analysis of who’s accessing what and for what purpose can often speedily identify staff members engaged in this nefarious activity.
7. The Cyber Devotee.
This employee might be engaged in anything from innocent cyber-dating to hard-hitting cyber-crime. Wherever they are on the spectrum, you need to know about them quickly and a professional team can help you. With the development of globally interconnected digital networks, a new era of cyber-espionage has also opened up, which government agencies in key economies find increasingly difficult to handle. A detailed and regular analysis of your company’s digital system can certainly minimise the damage that this sort of activity can cause.
The message therefore is, know your employees and know what they’re doing. That’s not always 100 per cent checkable, but you’ll be surprised how often it is. In a world of high frequency share trading and cloud computing, you may think the human element has been minimised or totally subsumed by technology. But that’s not the case. Experienced professional teams have spent years following the evolution of technology – which places them ahead of the game – and also the means by which human beings interact with it and find ways to exploit it. They can bring all of that to bear on your corporate operations to provide you with a picture of reality that may differ significantly – even dangerously – from what you’ve come to accept.
