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Five Things You Should Never Do On A Work Computer

Whether you work remotely or in an office, the line between personal and work tasks can become blurred when working on your company computer. If you’re in front of a computer for most of your time during work, then it’s not unusual to get attached to your desktop PC.

Over time, this can lead to doing personal things on a work computer. At first, it might just be checking personal email while on a lunch break. But as the line continues to get crossed, it can end up with someone using their work computer just as much for personal reasons as work tasks.

In a survey of over 900 employees, it was found that only 30% said they never used their work PC for personal activities. The other 70% admitted to using their work computer for various personal reasons.

Some of the non-work-related things that people do on a work computer include:

  • Reading and sending personal email
  • Scanning news headlines
  • Shopping online
  • Online banking
  • Checking social media
  • Streaming music
  • Streaming videos/movies

It’s a bad idea to mix work and personal, no matter how much more convenient it is to use your work PC for a personal task during the day. You can end up getting reprimanded, causing a data breach at your company, or possibly losing your job. Here are several things you should never do on your work PC.

Save personal passwords in the browser
Many people manage their passwords by allowing their browser to save and then auto-fill them. This can be convenient, but it’s not very secure should you lose access to that PC.

When the computer you use isn’t yours, it can be taken away at any time for a number of reasons, such as an upgrade, repair, or during an unexpected termination.

If someone else accesses that device and you never signed out of the browser, that means they can leverage your passwords to access your cloud accounts.

Store personal data
It’s easy to get in the habit of storing personal data on your work computer, especially if your home PC doesn’t have a lot of storage space. But this is a bad habit and leaves you wide open to a couple of major problems:

Loss of your files: If you lose access to the PC for any reason, your files can be lost forever.

Your personal files being company-accessible: Many companies have backups of employee devices to protect against data loss. So, those beach photos stored on your work PC that you’d rather not have anyone else see could be accessible company-wide because they’re captured in a backup process.

Visit sketchy websites
You should assume that any activity you are doing on a work device is being monitored and is accessible by your boss. Companies often have cybersecurity measures in place like DNS filtering that is designed to protect against phishing websites.

This same type of software can also send an alert should an employee be frequenting a sketchy website deemed dangerous to security (which many sketchy websites are).

You should never visit any website on your work computer that you wouldn’t be comfortable visiting with your boss looking over your shoulder.

Allow friends or family to use it
When you work remotely and your work computer is a permanent fixture in your home, it can be tempting to allow a friend or family member to use it if asked. Often, work PCs are more powerful than a typical home computer and may even have company-supplied software that someone wouldn’t purchase on their own.

But allowing anyone else to use your work computer could constitute a compliance breach of data protection regulations that your company needs to adhere to.

Just the fact that the personal data of your customers or other employees could be accessed by someone not authorized to do so can mean a stiff penalty.

Additionally, a child or friend not well-versed in cybersecurity could end up visiting a phishing site and infecting your work device, which in turn infects your company cloud storage, leaving you responsible for a breach.

At least 20% of companies have experienced a data breach during the pandemic due to a remote worker.

Turn off company-installed apps like backups and antivirus
If you’re trying to get work done and a backup kicks in and slows your PC down to a crawl, it can be tempting to turn off the backup process. But this can leave the data on your computer unprotected and unrecoverable in the case of a hard drive crash or ransomware infection.

Company-installed apps are there for a reason and it’s usually for cybersecurity and business continuity. These should not be turned off unless given express permission by your supervisor or company’s IT team.

The Security Problem Of John’s “Other” Laptop

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Love it or hate it, Working From Home is huge and here to stay.

As a nation, we’ve really embraced the changes forced upon us by the pandemic. Many businesses have become more flexible with a mixture of office-based workers, hybrid workers and fully remote workers.

We had no idea that we could change so much, so quickly, did we? Work just doesn’t look the same as it did in 2019.

And because of that, cyber security in 2022 doesn’t look the same either. When you have people working away from your office, you need to take additional security measures to keep your data safe.

Even before we’d heard the word “Coronavirus,” many of us were working from home now and then. Checking emails on the weekend. Finishing up a project in the evening. Getting a head start on your week.

Now, Working From Home has to be taken more seriously. If any of your staff works anywhere away from the office, there’s a chance they’re taking unnecessary risks with your data. [Read more…] about The Security Problem Of John’s “Other” Laptop

How To Hire Top Talent With Advanced Tools

Setting up the best recruitment tool can solve numerous business related problems. A major problem that almost every business encounters is hiring a qualified candidate.

According to a survey, 87% of HR professionals reported that they could not fill positions with eligible and qualified candidates.

Apart from that, many companies find it difficult to reach qualified candidates, provide a remarkable candidate experience, and maintain diversification in the workspace.

You can solve these problems and numerous others by incorporating a top recruitment tool in your human resource department. Below, you will learn some benefits of using the tools for an effective hiring process.

Online recruitment tools increase recruiters’ productivity. By shifting to advanced technology, your team will learn new methods and factors to identify the best talent.

These tools are a huge help for them to reach new people through social media. Hiring the best candidate from a long list is an arduous task. However, you can automate your tasks using a recruitment tool, thereby saving precious time and effort.

While hunting down potential candidates, communication is really important. Using recruitment tools, you can maintain efficient and time-saving communication channels, effectively keeping applicants in the loop.

Recruiting tools you should use

The hiring process is no longer a manual task for most businesses. The reason top businesses are leading in this dense and competitive environment is that they focus more on hiring the right talent.

With manual hiring, the partiality in the process has a great impact on final decisions. Even if they try not to bring their emotions into the hiring process, they make mistakes.

Therefore, it is the right time to switch to advanced recruitment tools and enhance the skills of your human resource team. Here are some popular options among top businesses:

Recruitment chatbots

Going through an interview, candidates are more comfortable communicating with an AI tool than a team member. By knowing they must communicate with the chatbots, they will be confident inbeing transparent.

With recruitment chatbots, you can schedule interviews or take tests online. AI chatbots for recruitment not only help you make better decisions but provide an amazing experience to the candidate.

AI for screening

The screening process provides essential information about candidates and compares the top applications among all. Depending on the number of applications, this process is time-consuming.

Moreover, screening hundreds of profiles of applicants will be discouraging for your employees. While reviewing applications, they might overlook things due to pressure. However, you can automate your screening process through artificial intelligence recruiting tools.

These tools will shortlist eligible candidates, effectively reducing time and cost per hire.

Reducing bias software

Recruiting teams who use artificial intelligence to recognize talent can reduce the bias from screening, sourcing, and job descriptions. These AI-based tools will resolve the conscious and unconscious bias in the sourcing and screening process. These tools do not consider the candidates’ demographics such as age, gender, and race. Rather, they focus on hiring based on talent and skills. Reducing bias from the workplace will prevail in bringing diversity among the candidates.

Traditional techniques for recruiting talent include posting ads in newspapers, and placing boards. To speed up the hiring process and recruit the best talent, integrate advanced tools in your recruitment department to attract better quality candidates.

Three Ways To Evaluate Employee Performance

A performance management system enables you to evaluate your employees and helps you bring transparency to the process. These tools facilitate you with features for engagement and accountability of your employees across the company.

Factorial is a performance management tool that enables you to track the progress of each employee. This tool helps you customize the questionnaires and assign reviewers to easily manage and evaluate your teams.

With this tool, you can generate custom reports, create employees’ portals, add features in the individual portal and send a notification to the participants. You can access this software through a browser and your phone.

You can also use Factorial to integrate different add-ons and third-party plug-ins to streamline your workflow. You can unlock numerous connector tools with Factorial if you have an account on Zapier. The tools you can integrate include Google Calendar, Slack, Gmail, and Outlook.

Initially, they offer you a 14-day free trial that helps you assess the application. This management tool includes a few limitations that might slow you down a bit.

Trakstar is a highly customized tool to assess the performance of your employees. This tool includes comprehensive features and offers detailed analysis.

The interface of this platform is user-friendly and easy to understand. The developers designed this tool according to advanced social media websites so everyone can get the hang of it.

The top features that this software includes are 360-degree / multi-rater feedback, employee engagement surveys, and task management for thousands of employees.

It also facilitates you with setting SMART goals, customizes appraisal forms, and creates a flexible workflow according to the organization’s needs.

SAP is a popular and user-friendly tool that enables you to develop and retain employees, reduce attrition, optimize benefits, drive engagement, and increase the productivity of your employees.

This intelligent tool includes RPA or AI and robotic process automation capabilities. Furthermore, you can perform embedded analytics. SAP is an expert-recommended feature that offers flexibility to your employee management.

You can customize the SAP ERP based on your business infrastructure to perform wide-ranging tasks and activities. It offers you an SAP API business hub that includes digital content packages with sample applications and APIs.

This platform offers you a 30-day free trial period. After the trial period, they will charge you every month depending on the number of users.

Tools To Improve Internal Communication In Your Business

Improved internal communication will build stronger teams, increase employee engagement, and enhance productivity.

You can build a better and friendly workplace by increasing communication between employees.

However, the main challenge is to implement an internal communication tool into your business system. Choosing the best tool among all is a difficult decision to make. Therefore you can choose among these top tools for internal communication:

Intranet is a centralized communication tool to share, gather, and access information. This is a private network that requires a web connection.

Digital Signage is a workplace communication tool that requires strategically placing screens. You can also use instant messaging applications dedicated to internal communication such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype, etc.

After implementing the tool into your workplace, ask your employees to share all information through the channel. Then, create a team or assign managers to lead the communication process.

A communication team is better than a meeting, and you can utilize it in numerous ways, including training sessions and surveys.

How Tech Solves Managerial Problems In Small Business

Thomas Fox is president of Tech Experts, southeast Michigan’s leading small business computer support company.

Before the digitalization of the business sector, it was impossible to comprehend how easily you can perform business tasks today.

Every business industry is drastically changing by integrating new and advanced tech tools. The way you communicate with clients and other employees is different from how it used to be. This is possible because we now have tools capable of solving our problems in a better way. Here are some ways in which technology is solving managerial problems in small businesses:

Resource Planning

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, you will agree that managing your resources is a challenge. Especially when you are a start-up, you need to visualize your business process and create effective resource plans. Integrating an Enterprise Resource Planning tool into your business infrastructure is an efficient way to solve departmental problems including finance, sales, marketing, and accounting.

[Read more…] about How Tech Solves Managerial Problems In Small Business

Reduce Workplace Stress Using Technology

Many business owners focus on reducing work-related stress to keep their employees active and healthy. This way, they can focus more on their work instead of taking leave.

Your employees should feel motivated while they are in the workspace. This way, they can evaluate and organize their life in a better way to ensure optimal work and life balance.

Why Should You Reduce Stress?

You should reduce workspace stress for numerous reasons. To know the importance of reducing stress, you must understand how it affects your employees’ physical and mental health. Consequently, it will impact business activities, hindering any progress towards long-term goals.

Reduce Stress with Technology

The main reason for workspace stress is a lack of productivity and focus. However, you can utilize technology for good, thereby reducing stressful work routines. Numerous applications are available to help your employees focus and manage their routine. Here, we will discuss some of those tools:

Project Management

Managing projects without any tools is a hectic task. Planning, prioritizing, and tracking tasks will take up a lot of your time. However, you can rely on different tools to perform these activities.

Integrate those tools, so your employees don’t feel burdened. You can choose between popular tools such as Asana and Trello.

Time Management

When your employees are unable to focus and perform tasks due to stress, they can’t practice effective time management. Eventually, this will add to their stress and pressure.

Tools such as Pomodoro are an amazing option to manage time in your workplace. When your employees meet deadlines, they can focus on other tasks or relax.

Collaboration

Other time-consuming activities involve collaborating and communicating with colleagues. You can streamline internal communication by integrating tools such as Slack, Google Drive, and Basecamp.

These tools will not only help your employees communicate with each other, but they can also share and receive files and track their tasks. Furthermore, these tools will keep your tasks and conversations organized for future reference.

Stress Relief Apps

You can introduce various stress reducing applications among employees. For instance, applications that reduce anxiety will keep your employees calm and happy.

You can share these applications that make it mandatory to relax for five minutes after working for an hour. Applications such as Mindwell and The Breathing App are popular for reducing stress.

Increasing workload and giving your employees a tough time will have a negative effect on your business. With excessive stress, your tasks will become counterproductive, and employees will lose their focus. If you want to improve employees’ productivity, start by reducing workspace stress with some of the suggestions above.

Online Shopping Tips From Stay Safe Online

The following tips have been taken from the Stay Safe Online group, which is dedicated to helping us all stay safe when using the Internet.

We thought they were very good tips to also keep in mind as you get back into the swing of things after the holiday break.

Think before you click

Beware of emails, texts or other promotions that seem “off” or encourage you to urgently click on links. If you receive an enticing offer, do not click on the link. Instead, go directly to the company’s website to verify the offer is legitimate. If you can’t find it on their website, report the scam to your email provider as a phishing attempt. Remember: if it seems to good to be true, it probably is.

Do your homework

Fraudsters are fond of setting up fake e-commerce sites. Prior to making a purchase, read reviews to hear what others say about the merchant. Check trusted sources, like the Better Business Bureau, as well.

In addition, look for a physical location and any customer service information. It’s also a good idea to call the merchant to confirm that they are legitimate.

Consider your payment options

Using a credit card is much better than using a debit card; there are more consumer protections for credit cards if something goes awry. Or, you can use a third party payment service instead of your credit card. There are many services you can use to pay for purchases – like Google Pay – without giving the merchant your credit card information directly.

Watch what you give away

Be alert to the kinds of information being collected to complete your transaction. If the merchant is requesting more data than you feel comfortable sharing, cancel the transaction.

You only need to fill out required fields at checkout and you should not save your payment information in your profile. If the account autosaves it, go in and delete the stored payment details after the purchase.

Keep tabs on your bank and credit card statements

Be sure to continuously check your accounts for any unauthorized activity. Good recordkeeping goes hand-in-hand with managing your cybersecurity.

Another tip for monitoring activity is to set up alerts so that if your credit card is used, you will receive an email or text message with the transaction details.

Is Your Business Secure? Top Three Ways To Protect Your Company

Effective cybersecurity is not a “one size fits all” solution but needs to take into account the unique needs of your particular business.

That said, however, there are three key things you can do to immediately safeguard your business at a basic level.

Automate software updates

Let’s be real. We all forget things sometimes. Even something as important as updating the software on our devices. And sometimes it’s not even a “forget” but an “I don’t have time right now for my device to be down.” But automating updates and setting them to process during off-hours can be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful breach.

Educate your employees

Employees are the number one point of failure in any cybersecurity event. A recent report from Kaspersky Labs found that 90% of corporate data breaches occur as a result of social engineering attacks on employees – not the providers.

Use the Cloud

Many of us used to say that it was “too risky” to be in the cloud. That our data was “safer” here on-site where I can control access to every bit of the network. However, over the years, we have learned that using cloud solutions is actually more secure than on-site solutions and here’s why: cloud providers have a higher level of certification needed in order to prove the level of protection required of a cloud solution.

Cloud providers know it is imperative that their solution be the most secure solution available and any blemish can be a make or break problem for the longevity of their business. As such, they make it their business to know and keep up with the ever-changing cybersecurity world and work to implement the latest protections across their entire networks.

Last year was a record-breaking year for cyberattacks, with Colonial Oil, JBS, and even Buffalo Public Schools. The time to update your security protocols is now before you fall victim. Schedule your audit today and keep your business safe.

Flying Cars And Robot Servants? Business Tech Predictions For This Year

OK, so we still haven’t seen flying cars. But, you can get a robot to vacuum your carpet!

We’ve been busy reading the business technology predictions for this year. If you’d read these 20 years ago, they would have genuinely seemed like science fiction. But now, there’s nothing being predicted for this year that really surprises us. Here are a few we think you’ll see soon.

More automation: It’s now possible to make most software talk to most other software. And that makes it easier to automate repetitive tasks. Any time a human has to repeat a task, you can find a way to get software to automate it for you.

Health, safety, and wearable tech: These are small electronic, wireless, and autonomous devices that capture, analyze, and aggregate biofeedback or other sensory physiological functions related to health, well-being, and fitness and that can be worn on the human body (or in the human body with versions such as micro-chips or smart tattoos.)

AI being used by more businesses: Artificial Intelligence is no longer just for big businesses. It’s being used within software available to businesses of all sizes. You’re probably benefitting from AI already without being aware of it.

Work from home: Yes, the “new normal”. It’s not going away. Hybrid working is here to stay.

Next-generation remote presence (the “Metaverse”): With a nod to Facebook, incremental progress in existing VR/AR technologies, as well as new technologies involving senses beyond audiovisual, are driving better and better immersion.

Remote medicine: Remote medicine will enable patients to obtain remote medical assistance and physicians to perform procedures and consult with remote experts.

Disinformation detection and correction: Critical importance of having accurate information will trigger techniques to determine disinformation in politics, business, and social media.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs): Blockchain technology can be used for authentication and ownership of digital assets and potentially for a new type of virtualization of the ownership of physical things.

Fraud gets more sophisticated: Fraud operations are getting increasingly sophisticated, as the typical cybercrime arms race continues between prevention experts’ efforts and criminals’ innovations to beat them.

Other predictions include better voice search, such as using Alexa to get answers. And big improvements in battery tech.