The pandemic has forced companies to change the nature of their operations and incorporate allowing staff to work from home or employ telecommuting. It is estimated that 26% of the workforce is working from home. Even though, companies are planning to have employees back in the office, working from home will become a norm for 22% of the workforce by 2025. To keep employees or to attract new hires it is becoming increasingly more important for firms to offer working from home as an option.
Protecting Information With Remote Working
Remote working presents a unique set of challenges for information security because remote work environments don’t usually have the same safeguards as in the office. When an employee is at the office, they are working under preventative security policies for digital and hard copy information. While not perfect, it is harder to make security mistakes while at the office. However, with the use of a computer and the receipt and creation of documents outside of the office, new and never considered risks arise for the company, and additional security policies and procedures are essential.
Your Information Destruction Policy Needs To Be Updated
Privacy laws require that all companies and organizations have a written information destruction policy. It further requires that all of your employees be given a copy of the policy, be trained, and sign an acknowledgment that they have read and will follow the policy. They also are required to receive an annual refresher of the policy and sign an acknowledgment. Since working from home is new to many companies your information destruction policy needs to be updated to include protocols to safeguard and securely dispose of documents at home.
Require A Shred All Policy For Employees Working At Home
Don’t leave information protection and compliance with privacy laws to chance. Require all employees to shred every business document they are throwing away whether in the office or at home.
Make It Easy For Staff To Have Files Shredded At Home
FileShred makes it easy to support your employees with shredding services at their homes. We can provide locking collection containers for them to discard documents in or self-sealing shredding bags. Then when the containers or the bags are full we can go to their home to shred the papers. You need to control the secure disposal of business documents for every member of your staff not working in your office.
You Are Required To Keep A Record Of Document Destruction
Privacy laws require that you maintain a log of the secure destruction of documents. The easy way to be compliant is to hire a company like FileShred to destroy all of your company papers at your office or any remote location. After each service, you will receive a Certificate of Destruction which is a log you can use to satisfy this requirement.
Call FileShred
Even though you are not seeing your staff every workday you still need to know how they are protecting and securely disposing of information. Give FileShred a call today to learn about our shredding solutions for remote working and pricing.
