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Recent world events have a lot of businesses eyeing the future with more than a little trepidation. Your focus will have to shift if you have plenty of orders but not enough workers. If you have enough workers with a project through the end of the month but nothing in the pipeline, your attention will have to go elsewhere. Keeping your business going can take a lot of juggling.
Protect Your Facility
Keeping your facility well-lit can do a lot to send potential thieves elsewhere. If your business isn’t wired to easily add motion sensor lights, start with simple solar-charged lights that will sense the approach of an after-hours visitor and light up the area around your business.
Motion lights may not be allowed if your facility is in a residential area or a dark sky city. To reduce your risk in this case, consider adding solar security cameras to capture the face and form of human visitors. In especially dark areas, a solar-powered trail cam could be an ideal choice to recognize the face of folks who are there to cause trouble.
Protect Your Data
The year 2020 saw many employees putting in their time from home. Computers in homes can be quite as effective as those in the office, but they are at greater risk of abuse, breach, or contamination.
Ensure that your employees know that each work computer in the house is the possession of the business. Remind work from home employees that these machines should never be used for personal gain or gaming. Even children who need to do homework will need to do it on another machine. If your employees have a “computer room” where the shared family computer lives, they will need to store their work computer elsewhere or break it down and store it after each use.
It’s also critical that each computer be screened for security risks when it comes back to the office. You can avoid expensive fixes and computer downtime by creating a protocol or prescribed list of checks and updates each time a work-from-home machine comes back into the office and gets reconnected.
Protect All Your Workers
All of your employees need to be able to work safely in your setting. If you’re going to boost staffing with temporary workers, invest in temporary staffing insurance to prevent loss due to accident or injury.
Temps are often eager to work but may bring more energy than skill to a particular project. To keep them safe and focused, consider having them shadow a skilled employee with strong communication skills. Do your best to keep your temporary staff members in a secured area to prevent anyone working trying to work too closely to any hazardous or highly technical tools.
Protect Your Investment
One of the biggest investments you can make in any business is in the training of your employees. Protect that investment by encouraging all employees to add to their existing training and certifications in a way that makes sense for them.
Everyone can benefit from better
- time management
- email organization
- communication
Free training is nice, but many free trainings have a costly test at the end of the free training. If you have an employee who has shown a history of putting their training to very good use for your company, it’s time to pony up the cash to cover the test once they pass and share the good news when they do well.
Protect Your Future
When you’re going through the books at the end of the day, take a hard look at your total debt. If your organization is heavily leveraged, you could be at risk of losing your business in an upcoming economic bump.
Carefully work your way down your list of total debts. This is a number that can cut deeply into your bottom line. If you have a large order pending and lose your supplier, you could rapidly find yourself drowning in raw goods you can’t pay for, loaded up with finished goods you can’t sell, and no credit to buy more of the product you do expect to sell.
Maintaining logical debt levels, keeping your current employees cognizant of cyber challenges and keeping everyone effectively trained will reduce your risk. Add a layer of extra employee insurance will be fair to all employees.
You may also like: 6 Best Strategies to Improve Business Security
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