The UNSECURITY Podcast – Episode 78 Show Notes – Working From Home

• Is Working From Home The Future Of Work? – https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2020/04/10/is-working-from-home-the-future-of-work/#4260c2c846b1“An early-April 2020 MIT survey of 25,000 American workers found that 34% of those who’d been employed four weeks earlier said they’re currently working from home. Combined with the roughly 15% who said they’d been working from home pre-COVID-19, that means nearly half the U.S. workforce might now be remote workers.”
  • “The Brookings Institution’s Katherine Guyot and Isabel V. Sawhill just wrote their take on remote work and COVID-19, calling the pandemic “among other things, a massive experiment in telecommuting.”
  • ‘In a March survey of HR execs by the Gartner IT research firm, 76% said the top employee complaint during the pandemic has been “concerns from managers about the productivity or engagement of their teams when remote.”’
  • “In Buffer.com’s9 State of Remote Report, 19% of remote workers called loneliness their biggest struggle with working from home and 17% cited collaborating and/or communication.”
• Some May Work From Home Permanently After COVID-19: Gartner – https://www.crn.com/news/running-your-business/some-may-work-from-home-permanently-after-covid-19-gartner“Gartner last week released results from a March 30 survey of 317 CFOs and business finance leaders that found 74 percent of those surveyed expect at least 5 percent of their workforce who previously worked in company offices will become permanent work-from-home employees after the pandemic ends.”
  • “According to Gartner, about 25 percent of those surveyed expect 10 percent of their employees will remain remote, 17 percent expect 20 percent will remain remote, 4 percent expect 50 percent will remain remote, and 2 percent expect over 50 percent of employees now working from home to permanently work from home after the pandemic subsides.”
• Working from home has a troubled history. Coronavirus is exposing its flaws again – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/12/working-from-home-history-coronavirus-uk-lockdown“According to the Office for National Statistics, only 5% of the UK labour force worked mainly from home in 2019, but well over a quarter had some experience of home-working.”
  • “With all but key workers confined to their homes, the virtual office is now the new norm – a development that could prove to have far-reaching consequences.”

A different approach – S2Me and S2Team

[Evan] In early 2019, SecurityStudio release its first version of S2Me. The S2Me was released (well ahead of COVID-19) to gauge people’s information security habits at home and S2Team was a way to share the results with an employer without violating privacy at home. Last week, SecurityStudio released version two of S2Me and I’d like to talk about all this.

• What is S2Me?
• What is S2Team?
• How do S2Me and S2Team work together?
  • S2Me is a simple, personal information security risk analysis tool for use at home. S2Me helps people understand their risk related to security, privacy, and safety. Once these risks are understood, S2Me attempts to motivate people to build better information security habits at home.
  • S2Team is a collection of S2Me aggregated results to help organizations understand their employees information security habits. Organizations use S2Team to develop better, more personal information security training programs.
  • A couple of quotes from the “Introduction to S2Team and S2Me Topic Descriptions” draft document:
    • “The problem isn’t people. The problem is managing risk related to people.”
    • “People are creatures of habit. People will occasionally deviate from their habits, but habits are their default. Habits create peoples’ baseline and become nearly (or in some cases completely) involuntary.”
    • “People choose to form new habits because if they desire the positive outcome or because they fear a negative one.”
• A quick peek into S2Me.
• A quick peek into S2Team