Password Manager: Your Employees' New Best Friend

A password manager can help your staff create robust passwords, across all of their accounts, without ever having to remember them. This is a crucial point to draw upon to get your team on board, as they may find it to be more comfortable than their current way of working.

How to pitch a password manager to your employees

1. State the risks

Your employees may be blissfully unaware of the stats, furthering the culture of poor password management strategies. By informing your employees that over 80% of hacking-related breaches are caused by weak, stolen and reused passwords, they may realize the problem's magnitude.

2. Explain how password managers can elevate workflow

Although initially implementing a password manager may be met with a choir of "I'm too busy," you can convince them it's worth the initial investment by explaining the benefits.

Password managers can save your employees on average 50 hours a year of just typing in login details while reducing mental load and making time-consuming regular password reset strategies obsolete.

Encourage uptake and begin by showing employees demonstrations of how a password manager could work for them.

3. Introduce them to a team password manager

Sometimes, it just takes the initial push to get people on board. Once employees start reaping the benefits of a fully flexible, deceptively simple password manager, they won't turn back.

Why should your employees use a password manager?

Password managers take the guesswork out of security, providing your workforce with a comfort blanket of safe sharing and easy-to-manage interfaces that take the burden of business security off their shoulders.

Many employees fall into the trap of reusing personal passwords as business logins. This can become troubling for them if they feel responsible for a breach.

Many cyber-attacks are opportunistic. Cybercriminals may come across an employees' Netflix password in a leaked data dump. If that employee has reused that password at work, suddenly the hacker can gain access to the whole business.

By taking the control out of your employees' hands, you are not only saving them an upset - you’re also saving them countless post-it notes of login details and spreadsheets of password admin, allowing them to feel more secure and your business to run smoothly.

How does a password manager help security?

Security experts love password managers, and for a good reason. They are a foolproof way of encouraging employees to practice good security health, making every password unique, long and complex, mitigating hack attempts.

The average user has over 191 unique login credentials. Removing the need to remember all 191 logins makes the impossible feat of total password security possible.

How password managers work is simple

Employees will save all of their passwords to the manager and then create one "master" password for all of them.

When they sign into a site, they only have to recall that one master password. That means employees can make this one password impenetrable through tools such as security challenges, systems that evaluate the strength of a previous password or a password generator to build new logins altogether.

Additional tools such as Multifactor Authentication (MFA) can work in tandem with a password manager and provide even more security.

It’s important to note that password managers operate with 'Zero Knowledge' security, which means although the password manager itself 'knows' employees' passwords, the system as a whole is blind to them.

What this means is data is encrypted and decrypted at the device level. Any data stored in the vault is hidden along with their master password and the keys used to encrypt and decrypt data. These details are never sent to servers and are never accessible by anyone but the user.

Explaining this can build trust between skeptical employees and the tools at their disposal while protecting their data from being accessed.

Poor password behavior is habitual, a habit that needs to be broken to protect your business, but scare tactics won't work.

This is why it’s so essential to build trust between employees and password managers to create long-term results. Instead of shaming them for their current practices, suggest a safer, more accessible, and most importantly, future thinking method.

By focusing on the benefits that a password manager will have for your team, you allow them to embrace the idea without resistance, allowing your business to run smoothly while mitigating attack risks.

Further reading:

• Eliminate Passwords for Employees
• Psychology of Passwords: The Online Behavior That’s Putting You at Risk
• The Password Exposé