Hybrid Workforces Need Employee Notifications Now More than Ever

Now more than ever in this hybrid working world, employees value transparency, connectedness, and timely communication. When your organization communicates with employees when an incident occurs, or when an announcement affects their safety, they know that their time and well-being are being respected. 

An employee notification system makes the immediate reception of important information possible anytime and anywhere. The messages can inform or alert to maximize productivity of your employees. 

Texts and messaging apps are already a central part of your employees’ lives. Texts and messaging app messages like Slack are mostly read within the first 3 minutes after being sent, as opposed to only 22% of emails. Using these systems can help you to connect to your employees, increase engagement, and ultimately boost the employee experience. They’re quick, easy to manage and utilize all the devices they are using, from laptops to smartphones. 

When to Use Employee Notifications 

When starting to use an employee notification system, the following use cases have been shown to be the most efficient and value-packed: 

  • Emergency Situations: Use employee notifications to inform your employees about weather emergencies, transportation outages, or office issues. Not only is this information highly relevant, but it can save time, and boost efficiency. 
  • Deadline Reminders: Remind teams of project deadlines or upcoming deals. Company-wide, you can use deadline announcements to inform employees about things like benefits enrollment periods. 
  • Upcoming Events: To add a bit of fun, you can use employee notifications to promote the next office party, sports event, or team getaway. 
  • Major Company News: While not every piece of company news is worth a notification push, major news alerts can increase employee connectedness o the company and excitement about the company victories. 
  • Software Updates: Since call software comes with regular updates, you can inform your employees about new features or improvements that they can use. 

The Rules of Employee Notifications 

Employee notifications work, but sending too many, sending them at the wrong time, not targeting your message, or simply not providing value can quickly lead employees to ignore them. Consider the following rules when you generate your next employee message: 

  • Be relevant: When you send out employee messages, always consider how they will be received during your employees’ daily lives. According to a Push Index data study, highly targeted messages increase response rates by 293%! Target your employee messages based on departments, locations, and teams. 
  • Align with your company culture: Take time to decide on the proper tone to use. Employee messages should reflect the values of your company and your relationship with your employees, so make sure that your tone is consistent. 
  • Be engaging: Provide timely and relevant information so your employees are the first to learn about company news, benefit plans, or severe weather updates, not that John won the karaoke contest. 
  • Measure and improve: Track your employee notifications and their engagement rates. This will help you to determine which messages are more interesting and engaging to your employees and will help you to fine-tune future messages. 

Pay Attention to Timing and Wording 

Timing. Localytics data shows that when using sending an employee message, Thursday is currently the best day to get high click rates. The data further shows that sending messages between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. results in the highest average click rate: 15%.  

Wording. Keep your messages clear, concise, and compact. The aim is to catch your employees’ attention and quickly communicate your message. Messages should offer clear, concrete value, and communicate the desired action. 

Educate Your Employees on the System 

Once you implement your notification system, announce to your employees that you will be using a new service to notify everyone within the organization of critical events or announcements. It’s key that all employees understand that these notifications are important to stay informed and in the loop. 

Use Multiple Channels and Groups 

Multi-Channel. If you have an important message that needs to get to your people ASAP, make sure you leverage your employee notification system’s multi-channel functionality. Select as many channels as you believe are appropriate for your notification, but if this is indeed an emergency, we recommend contacting your employees over text message, email, Teams or Slack, voice call, and social media. 

Groups. To reach them with the right message at the best time, you’ll want to be sure to create robust grouping hierarchies that reflect your organization’s structure, for example, groups based on department, office location, and role for example. And if your organization has many locations, send notifications from the map using geofencing, so you can capture all employees in an affected region.  

Engaging your employees through thoughtful, relevant messages will enable your organization to interact and communicate with your employees successfully. Correctly using an employee notification system can help you connect with your employees in meaningful ways, create value for them, increase engagement and ultimately boost your employee’s experience. 

Are you interested in leveraging employee notification capabilities of Montra VIA? Do you want to connect with your hybrid workforce faster and more completely? Don’t hesitate to contact us at sales@montra.io! 

Six Things to Look for in Modern Remote Management and Monitoring Tools

If you are a managed IT services provider or a company that gets services from one, you are likely very familiar with remote management and monitoring software. RMM has been a mainstay application used by managed IT services providers for years. It provides several important functions that enable the cost-effective and secure delivery of the end-device services by IT service providers. 

The past two years have rapidly changed the breadth and frequency of remote work. Whether this is a permanent change in work habits or not, the remote worker needs to be supported as a standard part of IT service delivery, not as an exception – what people call hybrid work now. 

For modern RMM software to keep up with the changing nature of work and the applications and systems being used, the following items need to be addressed: 

1. Remote Updating Needs Rock Solid Reliability 

All RMM clients have supported remote patching and other software updates for years. Not all of them have supported remote updates effectively. The challenge in this new hybrid work model is that a remote user whose device gets bricked by a poorly executed update is especially adversely affected. The RMM client also needs to not only give users the option when to update, but also needs to warn them if they should be doing an update because maybe they are not plugged in, are in a public hotspot, or are on an unreliable internet connection. This approach will help minimize the times a user goes down and IT needs to scramble to get them running (typically at a high cost!) 

2. Top Rate Remote Policy Enforcement 

Policy enforcement needs to be included in any modern RMM. This is needed for a variety of reasons including 1) compliance to frameworks like HIPAA or NIST CSF; 2) security from a user making poor decisions like plugging in an unknown USB drive, and 3) intellectual property loss from users copying files or deleting files. The policy management importantly needs to be integrated with a centralized policy management system, so the policies that are enforced by the RMM are always in lockstep with the latest corporate policies. 

3. Remote Revocation of Rights is Critical 

Since employees can be anywhere when they leave the company, the traditional process of “hand me your computer” doesn’t work. Typically, laptops are mailed back after an empty box is shipped to the employee, or the system is just kept by the exiting employee. In either case, the user’s rights to access data on the device need to be removed remotely and preferably the data wiped. Not all RMM software does this well or in coordination with other HR and IT offboarding processes. 

4. Remote Control Is No Longer Optional 

To solve some issues remotely, it is often easier for the support engineer to take over control of the user’s system. This has been an optional feature in a lot of RMMs, but modern RMMs need to support this feature and support it well. It needs to work through consumer-grade firewalls and in typical co-working spaces, airports, and coffee shops. 

5. Need to support Macs and PCs 

Mac devices have continued to make inroads in the corporate environment. The new M1 processor Macs have provided a new price-performance benefit that is noticeable to every user/ Additionally, with more employees working from home, there are more employees that are doing work on their personal Mac. To properly support these users, RMM software needs to either support Mac and Windows equally well or managed IT service providers need to use two RMMs – one for Mac and one for Windows.  

6. Location Information Needs to Be Accessible 

Location information is available on most modern laptops. It can be GPS-based or WiFi-based, but it should be made available to the RMM. This is a necessary feature in a hybrid working world for many reasons. Employers need to know where employees are in emergencies, info-security needs to know where the device is for login and data usage rights, and it is helpful when a device has been lost or stolen. Modern RMMs need to tap into that information so that managed IT service providers can use it to track assets, data, and people. 

Montra successfully manages thousands of remote devices across all the hybrid workplaces of our customers. If you would like to learn more about how we can keep your workforce productive and secure, please email us at sales@montra.io. 

Remote Workforce Business Continuity

Ensure your Business Continuity Plan Secures your Remote Workforce

In our last Securing Remote Workers Blog, we discussed how organizations in today’s world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Another critical element for securing your remote workforce is ensuring your business continuity and disaster recovery plan includes the ability to support your remote workforce with little or no notice. An organization must be capable of sustaining normal operations due to a power outage, illness, flooding, or similar event, which makes it unsafe for employees to travel onsite. In such an event that disrupts normal business operations, an organization must be capable of rapidly transitioning to a fully remote workforce.

If you already have a business continuity plan, you should consider adding remote workforce security capabilities to your plan, such as:

  • Multifactor authentication
  • Data loss prevention (DLP)
  • Advanced Threat Protection
  • Wireless connectivity

If you do not have a business continuity plan, the Department of Homeland Security provides details on the following four steps:

  1. Conduct a business impact analysis to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes and the resources that support them.
  2. Identify, document, and implement to recover essential business functions and processes.
  3. Organize a business continuity team and compile a business continuity plan to manage a business disruption.
  4. Conduct training for the business continuity team and testing and exercises to evaluate recovery strategies and the plan.

For more information you can download a summary guide here.

 

Remote Workforce

7 Critical Considerations for Firewall Performance in the Era of Secure Remote Work

All organizations in today’s world must adapt to changing business conditions to ensure a secure remote workforce. Traditional firewalls cannot scale across multiple applications required for secure telework, placing the burden on IT teams to upgrade existing firewalls. Upgrading outdated integrated firewalls and virtual private networks (VPN) solutions become critical requirements to ensure a secure remote workforce.

Organizations are investing in Next-generation Firewalls (NGFW) to provide performance and advanced capabilities required to scale to meet future demands of distributed teams. 

Below are seven key considerations to guide your NGFW evaluation. 

Download the report here.

1. IPsec VPN performance

Teleworking employees have access to sensitive company data. Protecting this against compromises requires the ability to ensure that remote employee connections to the company network are secure.

To ensure your network is secure, you need to validate that your NGFW can sustain the user connections and encrypted traffic load independent of the location of the users.

2. Threat protection performance

How well does your NGFW perform when running full threat protection? To sustain performance with complete threat protection, you need to insist on real numbers and a close reading of documented performance claims from your vendor.

3. SSL inspection capacity

A majority of enterprise network traffic is now encrypted, and bad actors are continuing to take advantage. Ensure that your NGFW SSL decryption and inspection can offset these security risks and provide predictable performance with minimal degradation in speed.

4. Price vs. performance

Many NGFW vendors increase the size of their firewalls to boost performance and increase the cost. With big leaps in disruptive firewall technology, ensure that your NGFW vendor combines price and performance with an eye to a smaller footprint

5. Credible third-party validation

No organization investing in NGFW should rely on a single vendor. Review third-party evaluations for detailed validation of various NGFW solutions.

6. Easy, single-pane-of-glass management

Security teams that have to toggle between multiple dashboards to assess vulnerabilities, respond to threats, and ensure system resiliency are not efficient. Rely on a vendor that can provide a seamless dashboard that aggregates information for efficient decision making.

7. Future-proofing

All organizations must embrace digital innovation and transformation to become more efficient and secure. Ensuring an NGFW that not only provides performance at agreeable cost and scale but can also anticipate future demands.

 

 

 

10 Ways to Stay Safe As We Return to Work

In the last week or so the national conversation has shifted from sheltering in place to returning to work. Slowly and carefully, but we are opening back up. Now is the time to remain vigilant to the constant threats to your business from ransomware and malicious attacks.

In a recent article, Google stated that since January it has seen a 350% increase in phishing attacks, and they saw more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to COVID-19 scams just in the past week. That’s on top of the more than 240 million daily spam messages it sees related to the novel coronavirus.

And it is not just companies that are getting overwhelmed. According to their own report, the FBI fielded 2,047 ransomware complaints in the U.S. in 2019. In response the crushing load of root cause investigations, the FBI has turned to corporate leaders and cybersecurity insurance carriers to better understand how to stop ransomware attacks.

The best course of action, is to proactively protect your organization from being attacked successfully. Making certain of that is a complex problem that is specific to each company, but we have created some quick tips to help you remember how to keep cybercriminals out of your IT operation.

10 Tips to Keep Cybercriminals Out

  1. Get the Facts. Stay away from the rumor mill and use information from reliable sources to make business decisions in chaotic times.
  2. Think Twice before Clicking Links. Make sure staffers are on the lookout for suspicious links that can lead to ransomware.
  3. Be Suspicious of Unexpected Attachments. Ensure users only open attachments from proven, trusted sources no matter how “official” that attachment looks.
  4. Automate Compliance. Have one less thing to worry about by choosing a dynamic web portal system that keeps track of everything.
  5. Protect those Passwords. Encourage safe password practices like using a password manager and not writing them on sticky notes.
  6. Beware of Strange Networks. Make staffers aware of the dangers of logging in from insecure public and home WiFi networks andhow to use them safely.
  7. Use Two-factor Authentication. An extra layer of security keeps passwords and data safe.
  8. Keep an Eye on the Bad Guys. Monitor the Dark Web to watch for company data so a problem can be addressed before it becomes a crisis.
  9. Stay Current on Threats. Work with a responsive partner that’s on top of today’s challenges.
  10. Ask for Help. Consult a security expert to plan effective strategies and get innovative solutions.

10 Tips to Keep Cybercriminals Out

So, while we seek continued improvements in our collective situations both professional and personal, continue to keep your guard up against ransomware and malicious attacks on your IT operation.

If you would like to learn more about how Montra can help you with these or other security threats, please contact us at info@montra.io.