How to encourage employees to protect technology at work
When humans feel mental possession over an object, it becomes an extension of themselves. Even though they might not legally own the item they will still feel a sense of attachment to it, wanting to protect it and avoid its loss.
Psychological ownership increases perceptions of value and leaves humans viewing an object more favourably. You can therefore see why increasing psychological ownership of work technology in your organisation would be beneficial.
Hot desk policies, cloud-based storage, prevention of technology customisation can all reduce mental ownership of the technology they are using leaving them unconcerned if a cyber-attack should render the computer or its contents unusable.
What is psychological ownership?
Psychological ownership is centred around the human decision-making heuristic known as the endowment effect. Humans place a higher value on items they own than similar items they do not. If two people are given different items of the same value, they will be unwilling to swap no matter which of the two items they had received.
Psychological ownership has even been found to exist for practices such as password creation, with an experiment by Renaud, Otondo and Warkentin finding people unwilling to change their password routines and expect to be paid more to do so than those around them.
How to increase the feeling of psychological ownership around work technology?
Here are three main ways in which psychological ownership can be increased:
- By allowing control of the item;
- Investing time and effort in it
- Coming to intimately know it.
How to apply these three factors to work technology within an organisation?
Control is how much an employee is allowed or able to manipulate the technology for their personal comfort. To increase psychological ownership employees could be encouraged to exert control over their computer by angling it away from the light, raising it to their personal eye level, adjusting the screen brightness and so on.
Other simple ways for employees to exert control is by personalising the technology such as the ringtone on their work mobile phone or using a personal photo as a screen saver on their laptop.
Other personal marks they could apply include chosen desktop icons, apps and taskbar links that make them feel more in control. By allowing some level of personal adaptation of company technology employees will come to instantly recognise it as theirs and feel a personal attachment to it.
This state of attachment will result in them being less willing to take risks that may result in a loss of the item, or its contents.
Self-investment — this is another way in which psychological ownership can be increased, however, in a workplace setting, there are some barriers to this. For example, employees are not generally involved in the repair and maintenance of the object, and data is now largely stored in the cloud as opposed to the technology acting as a data repository.
Self-investment can however be increased by ensuring the technology confirms the employee’s identity with managers appreciating a computer of a higher spec than those used by the people they manage.
Employees can also self-invest in the creation of their work technology by being involved in personalisation during set-ups, such as the choice of included software, or the colour of the laptop case provided.
Finally, if hot-desking is unavoidable employees should have automatic recall of their personal settings available via a computer profile that can still showcase their self-investment when they are using it.
Finally, psychological ownership can be increased by employees feeling closely linked to their work technology. The key to this is ensuring you provide each employee with technology that will last a while.
Employees need to grow alongside their technology, coming to identify it through its bumps and scratches received across time. Employees also come to relate to technology through the memories and experiences they have linked to it such as the view from the window when they are working on their computer.
The technology should be perceived as enabling their experiences such as helping them remember meetings, call saved contact numbers and read work emails outside of the office. Even those bothersome aspects of the technology, such as an app that periodically shuts down will increase psychological ownership.
Therefore, employees need to find comfort in the ageing, memories and experiences bound around the technology they use. If you do supply employees with a piece of technology that has been used by somebody else, ensure all previous owner contamination is erased to allow their personal journey to begin.
Every organisation will want their employees to value their technology more and feel motivated to keep it secure. By allowing employees to invest time and effort in creating, personalising, maintaining and storing information within work technology psychological ownership can be increased as well as their need to protect the technology and avoid its loss at all costs.
To see how the OutThink Cybersecurity Human Risk Management platform raises awareness, drives more secure behaviours and increases motivation across the organisation, watch a product overview video or book a demo.
