Employee Listening for Security Leaders: Strategies, Tips, and Best Practices

Employee listening involves strategically gathering feedback and insight to understand employees’ needs and challenges. HR departments use surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews to gather insights that facilitate the company mission and improve the employee experience. More recently, security leaders have recognized the value of employee listening for data protection and insider risk detection.

Contents:

• Employee listening 101
  • What is employee listening?
  • How security leaders can use employee listening
  • The goal of employee listening for security teams
  • Passive employee listening techniques
  • Active employee listening techniques
• Passive vs active employee listening techniques
• How to create an employee listening strategy for insider risk
• How to augment your employee listening strategy with automation from Aware

Employee listening 101

What is Employee Listening?

Employee listening is the systematic gathering and analysis of real-time feedback and data from employees about their work life. The purpose is to understand employee experiences, needs, concerns, and challenges, and use them to create an engaging and proactive environment for the workforce.

Incorporating employee listening into HR operations offers numerous benefits, including:

• Tapping into worker insights: Employee perspectives are invaluable for improving processes, products, and services, which help HR make informed decisions aligning the workforce’s and company’s needs.
• Helping employees feel aligned with the company mission: When employees feel heard, they engage more, creating a more cohesive and motivated workforce that commits to the company mission.
• Identifying problems before they escalate: Regular feedback helps HR teams identify concerns before they become significant problems. Prompt addressing of issues reduces employee turnover.
• Building trust and safety: Routine communications and feedback foster trust between employees and management, which leads to a more cohesive, often safer working environment.
• Retaining more employees over time: Employees feel valued when they’re understood, so they’re more likely to stay with a responsive team and management style while enjoying higher job satisfaction.

HR leaders can strengthen an organization’s relationship with its employees through employee listening techniques. Acting on that feedback will help the workforce feel more valued and understood.

How Security Leaders Can Use Employee Listening

HR departments aren’t the only teams finding employee listening useful. Security leaders may gain value from employee listening from a data security perspective. Some examples include:

• Human risk factors: Messages that include IP—such as code, passwords, or regex expressions—in company collaboration tools might break protocols designed to protect data security.
• Insider threats: Users handling sensitive data may exploit or misuse the information. These can be employees, contractors, or business partners, and they may be disgruntled or simply negligent. Whether they’re actively malicious or simply not following protocols, employee listening can help security leaders minimize these instances.
• Targeted social engineering: This type of cyberattack, sometimes called spear phishing, is when a specific individual or organization is attacked in a highly personalized manner. It can involve impersonation attacks, malicious apps, leaked credentials, or highjacked integrations. These attacks are incredibly deceptive and difficult to defend against, resulting in costly data breaches, malware infections, and financial fraud. They can cost millions in ransoms, fines, and remediation for clearing malware and repairing damaged reputations. Employee listening can help defend against them by identifying unusual activity in real time.
• Regulated data: Every organization handles some form of sensitive information, whether intellectual property, legal documents, financial information, payment card information (PCI), personally identifying information (PII), or other potentially regulated information. Securing sensitive data is required by regulatory laws. Ensuring employees are not improperly handling this data in collaboration tools is a major part of data security, and employee listening tools can provide new ways to surface this information.
• Data loss prevention: Security teams prioritize data loss prevention to protect data from unauthorized access or exfiltration. Monitoring data movement as part of DLP should involve employee listening to understand how employees handle data. Additionally, lower employee turnover resulting from effective employee listening means less concern over data exfiltration. There’s also the opportunity for more secure training protocols surrounding data handling.

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The Goal of Employee Listening for Security Teams

For security personnel conducting employee listening, the purpose is to surface incidents of higher risk.

• Early detection: Security teams may uncover potential risks that would otherwise have gone unnoticed until much later.
• Behavior patterns: Regular employee listening can highlight unusual behavior patterns or disgruntlement that could indicate an insider threat.
• Proactive about threats: Security leaders become more proactive instead of reactive, anticipating potential threats before they become actual concerns.
• Prevention measures: Security personnel can put measures in place to prevent problems, such as the sharing of regulated sensitive information in collaborative tools, where messages can be quarantined and stopped from being sent.
• Employee training: Employees can be better trained on regulatory requirements and updates based on a real-world understanding of how they share data.
• Build trust and secure the brand’s reputation: Brands can minimize reputational harm and prevent incidents that damage their clients’ trust. Investors and employees alike can see the organization’s demonstrated commitment to security and avoid negative publicity.
• Minimize disruption: Security teams can minimize the impact of their processes on employees’ daily work routines when there are regular employee listening strategies, including passive and active listening techniques, set up to understand the workforce without being invasive.

Active Employee Listening Techniques

Active listening means directly engaging with the employees to ask them for their insights and concerns. This technique is valuable for security teams and HR alike. Some techniques include:

• Surveys: Surveys are conducted at specific points in time— short and frequent pulse surveys, annual surveys, employee engagement surveys, or exit surveys— to uncover reactions surrounding current events, how opinions change year-over-year, or what an employee thinks as they’re leaving a company. The survey results can, depending on the response rate, drive decision-making and business goals.
• Long-form answers: Open-ended responses from employees help organizations gain deeper insights into their workforce’s thoughts and feelings in their own words, and surface issues the survey may not have asked about.
• Focus groups: Small groups of employees explore specific topics in detail and provide in-depth discussions with management concerning their opinions. Focus groups give rich, qualitative data in a collaborative environment and can help employees feel valued.
• Employee feedback sessions: These sessions give employees the chance for direct, open, one-on-one dialogue with security or management where they can discuss concerns for security, gaps they may have observed during their job duties, and their opinions of company protocols. They build a workplace culture of transparency while giving security teams real-time insights.

Passive Employee Listening Techniques

Passive listening involves non-intrusive methods a security team can use to gain data-driven insights without interrupting employees. These techniques are valuable to employers for highlighting potential security risks, employee sentiment, and toxicity concerns without being disruptive.

Techniques include:

• Sentiment analysis: Ingesting messages from company-owned collaboration tools in real time to analyze the overall aggregate mood of employees. Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) or AI-powered models can measure chat messages, emails, and internal communications to gauge reactions to change or crisis management or understand the mood and attitude of employees. Using these technologies, organizations can detect and address dissatisfaction that may lead to insider threats.
• Toxicity detection: These same AI/ML models can identify harmful and inappropriate content in workplace collaboration tools to catch bullying, aggressive or discriminatory messages, or other high-risk communications. This helps security teams prevent workplace harassment and can also be used in eDiscovery situations to surface messages for legal processes.
• Real-time monitoring for unauthorized IP sharing: Detect and prevent the unauthorized sharing of sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, passwords, or intellectual property like code or blueprints. Security teams can monitor company-owned platforms and implement DLP strategies to ensure regulatory compliance and prevent unauthorized data sharing.
• Topic and theme analysis: Security teams can follow topic clusters and track the prevalence of use over time to understand themes and subjects employees are discussing and raising concerns about. This helps when employees are uncertain about an organization’s direction or policies, have fallen victim to rumors or miscommunication, or are growing disgruntled or dissatisfied and may become a bigger security risk.

Overall, passive employee listening techniques help security teams gain actionable insights into emerging security concerns. Employee listening raises the vulnerabilities the organization is experiencing into the light so they may be handled before they become active security risks.

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Passive vs active employee listening techniques

To actively listen to employees is to directly engage and ask for opinions. Passive employee listening means unobtrusively listening to a broader level of conversation.

Active employee listening can provide employers with answers in a faster fashion, but companies run the risk of getting the answers employees think their managers want to hear.

Another concern is that minor issues can become inflated if they’re raised by the loudest voices. Meanwhile, a major issue could remain hidden if the employees affected don’t trust those to whom they’re reporting.

Sometimes, employees don’t want to get someone else in trouble, so they’ll refrain from speaking up. Asking too often can also result in survey fatigue.

The most effective security measures are a combination of passive and active employee listening techniques so security leaders can understand the organization’s true state.

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How to create an employee listening strategy for insider risk

Setting up an employee listening program to minimize insider risk doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are some steps to consider.

1. Define objectives and key outcomes. Once you have specific security risks you wish to mitigate, you can establish the KPIs which will show successful reduction in those risks. From there, you can observe the desired outcomes, such as improved security awareness among employees, increased compliance with security policies, etc.
2. Evaluate the current state of risk detection and information security. Conduct a security audit to assess current measures and identify gaps. Review previous incidents to surface patterns or common factors. Evaluate the current employees’ level of security knowledge to identify where training is needed.
3. Differentiate between passive and active techniques. Identify where you’re actively and passively conducting employee listening already and determine what’s working and what isn’t. Keep the effective tools and strategize new techniques to replace what doesn’t.
4. Select and implement chosen techniques across channels. Choose the appropriate software solutions for automated monitoring and people analytics. Implement active techniques where appropriate. Integrate coverage of employee listening techniques across email, chat, collaboration platforms, and everywhere necessary. Introduce a phased rollout for any new techniques. Set milestones for full implementations and expectations for initial results.
5. Educate stakeholders on employee listening initiatives. Determine the appropriate level of detail of the results of the strategy, and then create a plan to share the insights with the relevant stakeholders. Hold periodic meetings to go over trends and engage business leaders in how to act on the insights. Share general findings with the employees to build trust through transparency and demonstrate how findings are used to improve security.
6. Track success over time with continuous listening strategies. Implement continuous employee listening to fine-tune the capabilities of your AI/ML-powered models to meet your security needs. Generate reports for key metrics and trends and build long-term data analysis to surface patterns and recognize risks. Review and adjust strategies both from analysis against KPIs and from feedback from stakeholders. Adjust as needed.

Organizations following a structured approach to effective employee listening strategy based on transparency and effective measurements to mitigate insider risk can foster a security-aware culture and build trust with their entire workforce.

How to augment your employee listening strategy with automation from Aware

With the sheer volume of messages employees send every year, it’s not possible to monitor and analyze these communications manually. Additionally, searching for keywords and regex instances isn’t enough—employees sharing these sensitive items know how to circumvent the rules and are beating these searches, too.

To manage these challenges, organizations need advanced automation from contextual intelligence platforms like Aware.

1. Leverage advanced NLP and ML/AI models: With industry-leading NLP and proprietary AI/ML models to ingest and analyze messages in real time, the Aware platform gets results in minutes instead of days and includes contextual understanding that reduces false positives even when employees try to avoid detection.
2. Implement comprehensive monitoring solutions: With a centralized dashboard, security team members can monitor digital conversations and allow for immediate identification and comprehensive searches to surface potential risks.
3. Enhance data management and compliance: Make smarter decisions for data management with comprehensive data retention policies, role-based access controls (RBAC), and alerts for messages that indicate sensitive data sharing, which provides an opportunity for employee training and regulatory compliance.
4. Human behavior risk analysis: Aware’s proprietary NLP delivers near-human accuracy for sentiment analysis of employee communications, including the context in which the messages were written. This helps identify growing dissatisfaction that could become an insider threat, or surface human signals that may highlight behavior patterns that pinpoint vulnerabilities to data.

By integrating advanced automation and employee listening tools, like Aware, organizations can effectively manage a large-scale volume of employee communications and get the pulse of their employees’ sentiment. Not only is automation more efficient, but it can also help identify security vulnerabilities and give leaders insight into closing those gaps.

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