Is your team happy? When was the last time you asked?

By George Ralph, RFA

Is your team happy? When was the last time you asked?

Remote working has thrown us a number of new challenges over the last 12 months. One of the many things that has been at the forefront of my mind is how to know if my team are keeping well. In an ideal world I would like to know that my teams are okay in themselves, but also happy with their professional position at RFA. I used to get a good idea of this by just walking through the office every morning, visiting our offices globally, catching up with people and checking in on them, but it is so much more difficult to tell via a voice or video call how your team are really doing.

AI is starting to show it’s versatility and it is becoming more of a disruptive force in day to day business. HR is a good example of how AI and behavioural analysis can help us, particularly in a remote working environment. While there isn’t a replacement for person to person communication in some cases, there is also a place for AI and its ability to collate, manage and read an incredible amount of data, far and beyond what we as humans can achieve. HR data can reveal future trends, predict behaviour and manage the future talent needs of your business. AI can automate routine HR tasks and help create actionable insights from the data harvested from each employee. We know human interaction isn’t just a necessity it is also a pleasure, and while we don’t want our current experiences to have a long term impact on this, it also makes good business sense to consider your HR strategy as part of your overall digital transformation strategy. There are real positives to introducing AI and ML in the field of HR, as spotting and nurturing talent, managing focussed training and also to support searches for connections, patterns, and correlations in how your team are working operationally.

In a remote working environment, one of the most difficult things to spot is when an employee isn’t happy or is planning to leave. In the current climate, company security perimeters have been pushed further out, decentralising cyber security calling for a need for newer and more advanced end point security tools. We know there has been a rise in cyber-attacks, which has increased demand for forensics and incident response needs in cyber security, but there is also a need to use behavioural analysis to keep oversight of your team to keep company and client data safe from the inside. Using real-time analytics can not only show the impact that absences and unplanned diary changes might have on KPI’s, it can also allow firms to spot anomalies in when and how an employee logs in, what kind of files they are trying to access or download and any other unusual behaviour that could be cause for concern and might require further investigation by a manager.

Rogue staff or potential bad leavers are a hazard in every firm. RFA’s Managed Detection Response, incorporating Endpoint Detection Response, monitors processes and executables at the endpoint, but also monitors for potential adversarial activity. Leak detection and alerting preserves the integrity of corporate data at the endpoint, and MDR provides predictive alerting while correlating events to also identifying risk. Providing a a 360-degree view of your technology, MDR not only delivers round the clock cyber-attack prevention and management from outside actors, machine learning monitors user behaviour internally and flags anomalies that may require further investigation. Where data security is elevated due to travel for example, RFA deliver containerised desktops to machines, allowing users to view data, presentations and contracts, but not to download or deliver to external sources via email.

This might all sound a little big brother but to be clear, the measures we put in place with our clients are there to enhance security and protect data and people. There is a fine line of course and creating an environment that isn’t pleasant to work in or actually has a negative impact on business flow is not the solution. This isn’t what this is about at all. In a time where hybrid or remote working is the normal day to day function of a business, using data to collate, corroborate and monitor team behaviours is becoming a necessity and much more than a ‘nice to have’. It is an extension of your firms overall digital transformation process and an opportunity to improve the operational efficiency of your firm.

By using the tools that are available you will allow your mangers to have more time available to help develop your employees and support their career, therefore reducing the risk of bad leavers to begin with.