How you can reduce employee stress and fight cyber crime

“Is it normal to be stressed at work? '' asks a young person just starting out in the workforce. 

For those of us who have spent many hours showing up to work, a smile may tweak the corners of the mouth. 

Yes and No I hear you say. At times there are huge amounts of stress and sometimes things just seem to fall into place. 

Even though a person may enjoy the environment and the tasks being performed there are always expectations and it is the management of these expectations that will determine the level of stress that is experienced.

A USAF fighter pilot program teaches that stress is a physical thing that happens to the body and that everything in life is a stressor. Stressors can be imagined as building blocks. As building blocks are added to life so the stressors add up. 

Imagine that you start placing your building blocks on the floor and as you add blocks to your tower so it gets taller and more unsteady. Each person's life has a stress threshold. This is the height that the tower can get to before it becomes overwhelming.

To manage stress the key is to take care of the building blocks, tasks or expectations that are in your tower. When a building block is dealt with the height of the tower is reduced and this lowers stress levels.

Knowing which blocks that can be easily dealt with is important in reducing stress.

As this is a cyber security blog how does all of this stress concept relate to protecting your business. 

To protect your business it is important to ensure that everyone understands how to be cyber safe. Being cyber safe is another task and an additional stressor. Cyber safety messages are all about us and everyone is becoming more aware of the need to be cyber safe.

But do we all understand what to do to be safe on the internet?

If this question is not addressed the stressor block of cyber safety becomes larger than it needs to be. In providing cyber training to everyone in the organisation it allows everyone to minimise the size of the stressor “cyber security”. This stress block not only gets smaller from each employee's stack of concerns, but it reduces management's stressor concerns of how susceptible the business is to succumbing to a cyber attack.

It is a relatively easy activity to put in place cyber training for all the people in the organisation. This is cyber training for those dealing with the IT elements of your business and cyber security training for everyone else. This will give those responsible for your IT requirements the knowledge to put in place the correct technologies. 

It will then help all of the staff on a daily basis to be cyber secure and mentally prepared without the stress.