3 employee-focused cybersecurity tactics your business
Most businesses consider their employees to be their greatest assets. While this is undeniably true, when it comes to cyber security, employees can also present the greatest risk. Today’s blog covers three employee-focused cyber security tactics your business can harness to help you prevent a cyber security incident. This is not a comprehensive list but highlights some high-value actions that can get you started on your way to cyber security.
Password Management
A recent poll by Google/Harris found that two-thirds of end-users in the U.S. use the same passwords for multiple applications such as banking, social media, and email. At the same time, 27 percent of cyber breaches at SMBs are caused by stolen credentials and 16 percent by password dumpers (Verizon). These statistics illustrate the danger that passwords can pose to businesses and the benefits that they can gain from utilizing password management—especially as much of the workforce continues to work remotely due to COVID.
Password strategies have changed over the years. We all remember writing our passwords down on a sticky note on our monitor or hiding it under our keyboard. Then there were the extremely long passwords that still required users to write them down because they were a long string of characters that meant nothing to them. Now, password management involves changing passwords frequently so that by the time a bad actors gets ahold of a password, it has already been changed. But this too, requires humans to remember new passwords, so they go back to writing them down.
Utilizing a password management solution provides your employees with a secure way to store and retrieve their passwords and generate secure passwords every time they need a new one. These solutions help mitigate the human element of handling passwords by creating high-strength passwords for all of the systems and sites employees use, encrypting them, and storing them in a secure vault on the employee’s device. Eventually, biometrics will take over the need for passwords. But until then, password management can take the frustration out of passwords and help your company prevent cyber attacks.
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Content and email filtering
We’ve all seen the horror stories—an employee clicks on a link in a legitimate-looking email, unleashing malware on the organization. Your employees are human. Even with training and knowledge, they will eventually make mistakes and click on email links or websites that they shouldn’t. A recent study found that phishing attacks are the biggest threat to SMBs and are the source of 30 percent of breaches. Malicious attempts that occurred during COVID illustrate how easily human errors can happen. According to Google, during April 2020, there were 18 million malware or phishing Gmail messages detected every day that were COVID-related. People were desperate to understand this new virus, and bad actors took advantage of the widespread fear.
How can you protect your business from cyber security incidents that arise from these mistakes? The answer is content and email filtering. Content filtering, also known as DNS protection, prevents users from accessing a known list of harmful sites such as malware and ransomware sites, even when they click on them. And email filtering keeps potentially harmful or suspicious emails from getting to your workers’ inboxes by utilizing anti-impersonation technology, anti-spoofing technology, and anti-phishing technology.
Security awareness training
Employees can be the weakest link when it comes to cyber security and are involved in one-third of security breaches (Security Magazine). Even with your company’s investments in cyber security tools, employees can still inadvertently cause harm to your business. For example, an employee can review their blocked emails, deliver them, then click on an email that they deemed safe but that contained malware.
To address these risks, one of the best cyber security investments SMBs can make is security awareness training for all employees. But 66 percent of SMBs don’t offer cyber security training to their employees (Info Security Magazine). Security awareness training teaches employees how to recognize and avoid threats, and continuously updates them on new cyber criminal tactics. The training can cover topics such as handling credentials and passwords, email and internet dangers, mobile device policies, incident response, and more. It may include initial testing of employees, sending out fake phishing scams to determine who is most likely to put the company at risk, and macro and micro-trainings on recognizing threats.
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At Logic Speak, our core values shape how we lead, how we work, and how we serve our clients. They’re not words on a wall, they’re filters for decisions and expectations for how we show up every day.
But here’s something we’ve learned the hard way: even good values have a shadow side.
Values, when taken too far or applied without self‑awareness, can create unintended consequences. What starts as a strength can quietly become a blind spot. And if we’re not careful, the very things we pride ourselves on can work against us.
So today, we want to talk honestly about our values, not just the best of them, but the risks of overusing them.
We Care for You
The strength:
Caring for others is foundational to who we are. It means treating people with dignity, empathy, and kindness. It means remembering that coworkers, clients, and partners are humans first, not just roles or tickets or invoices.
The shadow side:
When care goes unchecked, it can turn into avoidance. We may hesitate to give hard feedback because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings. We may tolerate behaviors longer than we should because we empathize deeply with circumstances. Over time, clarity suffers, and ironically, so does trust.
Care without courage isn’t actually care.
We Lean In
The strength:
We lean in when there’s a need. We take ownership. We step up when things are unclear or uncomfortable. This value fuels responsibility, initiative, and teamwork.
The shadow side:
Leaning in too much can become overfunctioning. We jump in to fix things that aren’t ours to fix. We take on too much instead of letting others wrestle and grow. Eventually, this can lead to burnout, resentment, or invisible bottlenecks where “that person always handles it.”
Sometimes the most responsible thing to do is not lean in, but step back.
We Love Our Craft
The strength:
We take pride in doing things well. We pay attention to details. We care about quality, process, and doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.
The shadow side:
At its extreme, loving our craft can turn into perfectionism. We may over‑engineer solutions, delay decisions, or become critical when others don’t meet our internal standards. What was meant to produce excellence can unintentionally slow momentum or make collaboration harder.
Excellence should serve the outcome, not replace it.
We Keep Improving
The strength:
Growth matters here. We believe learning never stops and that feedback, when handled well, is a gift. This value keeps us curious, hungry, and moving forward.
The shadow side:
Constant improvement can quietly create the feeling that “where we are is never enough.” Wins may go uncelebrated because we’re already focused on what’s next. People may feel like they’re always being evaluated instead of occasionally being affirmed.
Improvement without appreciation can feel exhausting.
Why This Matters: Blind Spots Are Part of Being Human
None of these shadow sides mean our values are flawed. They mean we’re human.
Every person, every team, and every organization has blind spots. Often, they’re not found in our weaknesses, but in our strengths, overused or unexamined. The danger isn’t having blind spots, it’s assuming we don’t.
That’s why self‑awareness matters so deeply to us. It’s why feedback matters. It’s why we believe asking questions like “How is this landing?” and “What might I be missing?” is a leadership responsibility, not a sign of insecurity.
Living Our Values With Humility
Our goal isn’t to live our values perfectly. It’s to live them thoughtfully.
That means holding our values firmly, but ourselves humbly. It means inviting perspective, welcoming challenge, and remembering that good intentions don’t eliminate unintended impact.
When we name the shadow side, we don’t weaken our culture, we strengthen it.
Because the best teams aren’t made of people without blind spots.
They’re made of people willing to look for them.
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