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The Intersection of Employee Engagement and Employee Protection

The Intersection of Employee Engagement and Employee Protection

What do many of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For have in common? A fundamental understanding of and investment in employee engagement. This can come in the form of break rooms with ping pong tables and free lunches on all work days that end in ‘y’ to quarterly surveys asking employees for their opinions on top company policies. Employee engagement looks different at each individual company but certain elements remain constant throughout: growth and development opportunities, a sense of community and ultimately, a culture of sharing.

Today’s job market favors the job seeker, meaning potential employees can be all the more picky about the employers they chose to work for. And when salaries and healthcare plans are capped, employers have begun to rely on innovative perks and benefits to attract top candidates. Enter free lunches, kegs on tap and office olympics.

An era of connectedness

In recent years, particularly in the tech industry, the workforce has evolved into one that demands flexibility and connectedness. Flexibility means that the world is your office: employees are working outside HQ whether from home, while in transit, or around the world. Connectedness means real-time chats, video calls, social media, and group chats.

These types of employee engagement - many of which manifest themselves online - require new tools to both facilitate and protect employees. From Facebook Workplace to Slack, businesses are adopting collaboration platforms that allow employees to quickly and meaningfully engage and collaborate with one another and as teams. From 1:1 chat conversations to company-wide forums to customer community interaction, these tools serve as a crucial element to effective employee engagement - but they don’t come without risks.

The case for employee protection

While collaboration platforms are intended for relevant work communication, they pose certain risks to employees and businesses. The nature of these platforms encourages sharing and open communication, which can lead to inappropriate sharing of either offensive or malicious content or links and more. Beyond offensive content sharing, sensitive information leakage and account hacking threats pose added risks that require new protection methods.

ZeroFox offers two-fold employee protection —individual-owned and corporate-owned. Individual employee Facebook and Twitter accounts can be protected from account hacking through early notification of risky account behavior. Corporate-owned employee protection provides security teams with the solution they need to secure workforce collaboration tools such as Slack and Facebook Workplace. Combining the two provides a higher level of protection that affords security teams and whole businesses protection from inappropriate sharing, sensitive data breaches and malware distribution.

Protecting employees while retaining their privacy

It cannot be overstated that protection and engagement are not at odds with each other. Rather, the strongest employee engagement strategies incorporate employee protection as a crucial element. Some companies are hesitant to include security tools alongside collaboration platforms at risk of building distrust with their employees. But this view represents a crucial misunderstanding of the value of employee protection, where security tools seek not to monitor employee behavior but rather to safeguard employees from potential risks. Safe interaction online is not only possible, it’s productive.

By identifying offensive content, malicious posts and sensitive information leakage and remediating at the source, security teams can ensure their brands, customers, data and employees are able to work together securely. To learn more about how ZeroFox protects employees, reach out to an expert today. We’d be happy to show you how the ZeroFox Platform integrates with top collaboration tools like Slack and Facebook Workplace.

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