Digital Wellness & Cybersecurity
In today’s working environment, digitalization continues to increase day by day. Especially with the establishment of the remote working discipline in companies, this digitalization has reached the highest levels. This trend, of course, increases the importance of cyber security and information security awareness. So, at what point do Digital Wellness or Digital Wellbeing and Cybersecurity intersect?
Many attackers target the human factor and possible errors instead of trying to bypass security products and devices due to both time and effort. According to a FireEye study, 91% of cyber attacks occur through e-mail errors.
According to another survey:
When the studies and analyzes are taken into consideration, the relationships between them are clearly visible. At this point, the importance of digital hygiene is increasing day by day. In its simplest form, digital hygiene aims to create a balance between our offline and online lives. I have to admit that I hesitate to say this sentence because creating balance does not mean rejecting technology completely. As IT professionals, it is our responsibility to ensure that this concept is understood correctly. If we need to continue with a few examples of what can be done;
Awareness trainings
Explaining to our colleagues how we can better manage the moments when we are stressed or tired through awareness training and ensuring that they remain calm when they encounter suspicious situations. To prevent stress and fatigue from getting in the way of instant decisions and mistakes. The continuous learning strategy aims to keep this awareness as high as possible.
Digital environment in order
Just like our physical environment, the messiness of our digital environment causes us to spend more effort while doing our work and indirectly creates digital hygiene problems.
Facilitating the communication of our colleagues
The main goal is to ensure more effective communication but with less effort. At this point, the use of communication applications such as Slack or Teams can be considered. These types of messaging applications allow for much less time-consuming and more efficient communication compared to communicating via e-mail.
Turned off notifications
Notifications can become very distracting while working and can easily reduce the efficiency of our work. While we are fully focused on a task and working with maximum efficiency, it is possible to completely distract ourselves from the subject with a funny video or a meme from the messaging application. Our efforts to focus on the subject again will be greatly enhanced. Advising our colleagues to turn off notifications of certain applications may help us in this regard. Likewise, constant e-mail traffic and the urge to check these e-mails will cause much more stress than checking e-mails at regular intervals. Recommending our colleagues to block their calendars and close their notifications for jobs that require deep dive will help us increase productivity.
The Importance of Ergonomics
When we talk about how we use digital devices, not only how we use the applications and systems within them, but also how we use the equipment is important for digital hygiene. Those who are curious about more, such as taking care to maintain the natural posture of the spine when sitting in front of the computer or sitting at least an arm’s length from the monitor, can check out this link: https://ergonomictrends.com/proper-sitting-posture-computer-experts/
Finally, there are many applications to increase individual awareness. With these applications, we can see how much time we spend in our digital work environment. This can remind us of times when we need to take a break or take a short walk. At first, when you start paying attention to these issues, they may seem different or unnecessary, and you may even think that you are spending the time you spend working on paying attention to these issues, but creating a balance between online and offline will result in less stress, less fatigue, and fewer mistakes that can be made both in your daily life and in the work environment.
