Onboarding your employees

Onboarding and protecting employees

How can IT managers handle it more successfully? Our expert team identified the two most prominent approaches to introducing a solution to end-users. Knowing that onboarding often falls on the IT manager’s shoulders, we have prepared materials that should help complete the cybersecurity solution implementation journey successfully and reach a high adoption rate.

In many cases, both management and employees find it challenging to understand how the solution works and why it benefits the organization. People from various departments believe that such network security tools are designed to track people’s activities and might jeopardize their privacy. Furthermore, lack of time and anticipation of a complicated setup usually causes a company’s low solution adoption rate, especially among less technologically savvy end-users.

Due to these situations, employees remain fixed in their initial negative mindset about changing their day-to-day working routine. They refuse to (privately or publicly) support the implementation of cybersecurity. How can we recognize and overcome these communication barriers more efficiently?

Based on internal discussions and various client cases, we have identified where existing approaches to onboarding fall short and what emerging tactics are gaining relevance. Here is what we noticed.

Approaching the team directly

Just sending a 3rd party onboarding email without personalization and tailored encouragement might be not enough to reduce the trust barriers. More often than not, the method of approach directly impacts winning over employees. Therefore, we advise your company’s management or Head of IT to approach teams directly and personally with a short motivation and explanation of why you are implementing such solutions.

Motivation through personal value

Organization-level goals might not always be the highest priority of employees, especially if it requires changes without a direct positive impact on their work. Therefore, while explaining the solution’s importance and the organizational need, underscoring personal benefits can help. These arguments can be as simple as personal data safety, privacy, and peace of mind. Knowing that from now on, a click of a simple link does not cause organization-level accidents may also decrease employees’ daily stress levels.

Process clarity

Unwillingness to adopt the solution might also come from fear of committing to something time-consuming or complex. Thus, knowing that the steps will be easy and take only a couple of minutes is reassuring. So, consider depicting and showcasing the coming steps to encourage adaptive response to onboarding. In addition, providing everything from instructions to company ID in one place might also help get more traction.

Even though the steps are relatively simple and explained, some users might still have additional questions or concerns. By normalizing the knowledge gap and providing learning opportunities, you can defuse anxious thoughts and increase the chances of buy-in and successfully adopting the solution right away.

In that case, you might consider sharing a prepared deck with the end-users to build a critical mass of end-users who will quickly understand, acknowledge, and adapt the solution. This tool underscores the cybersecurity solution need, provides essential details on setting NordLayer up, and contains the FAQ section — all in one place.