human resources Archives - Page 23 of 38

June 20, 2019June 29, 2023

Is Blockchain the Next Frontier in Combating Sexual Harassment?

Vault Platform has developed an app that uses blockchain technology to allow employees to document and report workplace sexual harassment on their smartphones.

“Interesting,” you say,” but what’s blockchain technology?”

Great question. I asked my partner, David Croft, who chairs Meyers Roman’s Blockchain & Cryptocurrency practice group. His answer: “Blockchains are decentralized databases, maintained by a distributed network of computers that rely on network effects and economic incentives to secure the network.”

In other words, blockchains are secure bits of data secured across a decentralized network of digital devices, for which the keys to unlock rely on every other block in the chain. Or, described another way (per Blockgeeks)—

A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block a timestamp, and transaction data. By design, a blockchain is resistant to modification of the data. It is “an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. …

A blockchain is, in the simplest of terms, a time-stamped series of immutable record of data that is managed by cluster of computers not owned by any single entity. Each of these blocks of data (i.e. block) are secured and bound to each other using cryptographic principles (i.e. chain).

Which brings us back to Vault Platform’s sexual harassment documentation and reporting app.

The app uses blockchain technology to provide a safe space or a “vault” allowing workers to write reports of harassment and store any evidence, says Neta Meidav, CEO of Vault Platform. The vault itself is private, she says, but at any time workers can use the app to send that information directly to HR. …

If workers decide to report harassment directly to their HR department they have two options, they can elect to individually report or they can choose to go together, Meidav says. By using go together, the platform will search for other complaints about the same individual. If others exist, then the reports will all be sent to HR together. If not, then it will be held until another employee reports that person. …

“The technology will identify if there has been past or present complaints about this person as well,” she says. “Your claim will go to HR with other people who have reported in the past.”

Blockchain has the potential to transform human resources management. It’s being used in hiring and recruiting, paying employees and contractors, tracking time and attendance, and verifying backgrounds (among other uses).

This post is in no means an endorsement of Vault Platform. I’ve never used it and don’t know of any company that has; everything I know about it is from reading its website and the few articles about it I found on the internet. That said, it is illustrative of how blockchain may, in the near future, disrupt HR.

If you are not at least investigating how blockchain technology can help you organization take its HR management to the next level and into the future, you are doing your business a disservice. Thankfully, I know a few attorneys who are at the ready to help.

June 19, 2019August 3, 2023

Employers, Stop Oversimplifying Your Employees’ Body Mass Index

Conference season is exciting when you hear a solid debate, learn more about a topic you care about or discover a speaker who is a promising resource.

But it also means coming across speakers who sling dangerous or overly simplistic ideas to their audience, in this case employers. I want to take this opportunity to gripe about my biggest pet peeve(s) in the employer health and benefits space. These are ideas I’ve heard at several conferences over several years and/or have read in a good number of articles about.

Here’s the biggie: Workplace weight loss or nutrition programs that hinge on body mass index on an individual level, especially outcomes-based programs whose “rewards” rely on reaching a certain BMI or losing a designated amount of weight.

“BMI is useful when studying populations and trends,” according to Medical News Today. But it can only give a rough idea of an individual’s health and weight status. There are flaws in the formula.

This is important to point out because if employers want to continue to micromanage employees’ health, they should know the nuance behind certain health measures instead of blindly trusting wellness companies.

To be clear, I understand that obesity is a considerable public health issue in America. I understand that there can be health risks.

But it’s also an issue I feel employees should feel safe dealing with in the privacy of their doctor’s office rather than having to share private medical information with their employer. Also, I’m aware of the fact that people and organizations have misconceptions about BMI and weight that are important acknowledge. Here are some important facts to know:

There’s a misconception that thinner people are healthier. This is not always the case, as weight is only one of many measures for health. (Northwestern Medicine)
Using BMI gives us a false idea about who has weight issues and who doesn’t. (Northwestern Medicine)
“It’s important to recognize that BMI itself is not measuring “health” or a physiological state (such as resting blood pressure) that indicates the presence (or absence) of disease.” (Harvard Health Blog)
Plenty of people have a high or low BMI and are healthy and, conversely, plenty of folks with a normal BMI are unhealthy (Harvard Health Blog). [This fact might not be considered in certain settings. For example, the New York Times recently reported about how, even though women can still be healthy with a high BMI, fertility clinics often refuse to treat them.]

I don’t know if employers in general understand the limitations of BMI.

The American Journal of Managed Care published an interesting research paper in November 2015 called “U.S. Employee Wellness Programs and Access to Obesity Treatment in Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance.” Its primary results were that 16 percent of employers required wellness program participation in order to receive full health benefits (how employers do not realize that this is coercion and does NOT make the program voluntary is beyond me!). Further, while most wellness programs set targets for weight and for other health indicators, most organizations health plans did not provide coverage for evidence-based obesity treatments.

The paper concluded:

For people seriously affected by obesity, the coverage gap described here is problematic because substantial improvement in their condition is unlikely without evidence-based treatment. This is true because obesity and its complications are typically chronic and progressive. Wellness programs may have little impact on costs driven by severe obesity in the absence of access to effective treatment for this chronic disease.

This is one of my major issues with wellness programs: They should be treated as secondary to real, HIPAA-protected medical benefits. Adequate health care is important. A wellness program should not be a replacement for certain coverage areas in a health plan. Also, if an employee would rather deal with health issues (any health issue, not just weight) through their doctor rather than a wellness program, they should not have to lose the opportunity to get hundreds of dollars in “rewards” like wellness program participants do.

I enjoyed this Consumer Reports story about privacy issues on wellness program. Its basic argument is that wellness programs often pose major privacy problems and that people should have a choice on whether they want to participate. Financial incentives or insurance discounts muddy the waters and may coerce people into sharing medical information.

Why is the free choice to participate necessary? The goals and recommendations of a wellness program may not align with your personal health care decisions, the article noted.

“If something you’re being asked to achieve in your workplace wellness program is unhealthy in your doctor’s opinion, you shouldn’t be required to do it,” said one source, Dr. Anna Kirkland, professor of women’s studies at the University of Michigan. “Wellness programs should never replace or supersede your doctor’s advice.”

The final point I want to make is that bias against people who are seen as overweight or unhealthy does exist. This is more so for women than for men, unsurprisingly; women tend to experience higher levels of weight stigmatization than men, “even at lower levels of excess weight.” Some negative stereotypes against seemingly overweight people include that they are “weak-willed, lazy, unintelligent and gluttonous.”

Further, a research report about this, “The Impact of Workplace Health Promotion Programs Emphasizing Individual Responsibility on Weight Stigma and Discrimination,” was released in November 2018. The research identified workplace health promotion programs as “potent catalysts of weight stigma and weight-based discrimination, especially when they emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes.”

This is a lot of information, but my main argument here is that employers shouldn’t look at employee weight and BMI in such a black-and-white capacity. Also, I want to stress the point that health plans (covered under HIPAA, unlike wellness programs) should cover evidence-based obesity treatments. Finally, as employers focus more and more on employee health, be aware that weight discrimination is serious and should never be tolerated.

Also read: Some Constructive Criticism on Wellness

June 19, 2019June 29, 2023

The 12th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Disguised Doctor

Norma Melgoza, a longtime employee of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, is suing her employer for sex discrimination and equal-pay violations stemming from a denied application for a promotion.

In support of her claim of glass ceiling gender bias, Melgoza points to certain misconduct of the interviewing physician. I’ll let the district court explain.

During an interview with one of Defendant’s doctors, she alleges the doctor wore “a Donald Trump mask” (the “Donald Trump Mask”), an act she described as “humiliating and offensive” to her, insofar as she inferred from this alleged act that the doctor (and, by extension, Defendant) “did not take her or her position seriously and thought nothing of impersonating a man who publicly antagonized Melgoza’s community [Mexican-American] and many members of her gender.”

For its part, the employer seized a Donald Trump mask from the physician’s office during its internal investigation of Melgoza’s allegations (although it claims that the actual look of the mask differs from Melgoza’s description of it).

Suffice it to say, if you wear a Donald Trump mask to conduct a job interview of a Mexican-American, female applicant, you might be the worst employer of 2019.

Also, thanks to this case I think I’ve discovered the trophy to present to this year’s winner.

Previous nominees:

The 1st Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Philandering Pharmacist

The 2nd Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Little Rascal Racist

The 3rd Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 is … the Barbarous Boss

The 4th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 is… the Flagrant Farmer

The 5th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 is… the Fishy Fishery

The 6th Nominee for Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Diverse Discriminator

The 7th Nominee for Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Disability Debaser

The 8th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Lascivious Leader

The 9th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Fertile Firing

The 10th Nominee for Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the Exorcising Employee

The 11th Nominee for the Worst Employer of 2019 Is … the ****y Supervisor

June 18, 2019June 29, 2023

What’s a Hostile Work Environment? You’ll Know It When You See It

“I know it when I see it.” These are the famous words of Justice Potter Stewart defining legal obscenity in his concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964).

I feel the same way about a hostile work environment. For a hostile work environment to be actionable, it must (among other factors) be objectivity hostile. What does this mean? It’s hard to define, but I know it when I see it.

For example, consider the case of Curtis Anthony, an African-American quality inspector for Boeing at its North Charleston, South Carolina, plant, sued his employer for allowing a racially hostile work environment.

According to ABC News, his allegations include white co-workers urinating in his seat and on his desk, leaving signs with the “n-word” near his workspace, and ultimately leaving a noose above his workspace. Boeing, for its part denies the allegations, stating that Boeing spokesperson wrote, that Anthony “is a valued Boeing South Carolina teammate, [and] there is no validity to his allegations.”

Bingo. Hostile work environment. I can’t necessarily define it, but I know it when I see it.

Regardless of whether an employee can hold you legally responsible for, let’s say, another employee peeing on his desk, why would let this misconduct go unchecked? Even if you think it’s just horseplay, you can’t ignore it.

If an employee complains about misconduct, your reaction should never be, “Well, I understand, but it’s not that bad, or at least not bad enough for you to sue us; now go back to work.” Your obligations as an employer-recipient of a complaint of workplace harassment never changes. Investigate and take prompt remedial action to reasonably ensure that the harassment stops and does not repeat.

Otherwise, you are setting yourself up for a very difficult and expensive lawsuit. In other words, urine trouble (sorry … not sorry).

June 17, 2019June 29, 2023

How Long of a Leash Must You Give an Employee Before Firing?

When a client calls me to ask for advice about firing an employee, the first question I always ask is, “What does the employee’s file look like?”

I want to know if there exists a documented history of performance issues to justify the termination, and whether said issues are known and understood by the employee.

I ask these questions for two reasons:

1. Can the employer objectively prove the misconduct to a judge or jury? Fact-finders want to see documentation, and if it’s lacking, they are more likely to believe that the misconduct was not bad enough to warrant documentation, or worse, that it did not occur. In either case, a judge or jury reaching this conclusion is bad news for an employer defending the termination in a lawsuit.
2. Surprises cause bad feelings, which lead to lawsuits. If an employee has notice of the reasons causing the discharge, the employee is much less likely to sue. Sandbagged employees become angry ex-employees. You do not want angry ex-employees going to lawyers, especially when you lack the documentation to support the termination.

So what does quality documentation to support a termination look like? Consider Anderson v. Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority (N.D. Ohio May 29, 2019)

Jason Anderson, African-American, claimed that GCRTA discriminated against him because of his race by denying him a promotion, issuing excessive discipline and ultimately terminating him. He lost. Why? Because his employer had a long and documented history of his performance and discipline issues.

On April 17, 2012, Anderson received a coaching for being involved in a preventable motor vehicle accident in an unmarked RTA Transit Police Vehicle.
On March 5, 2013, Anderson received a coaching for making disrespectful and unprofessional comments about a fellow officer over the police radio.
On August 14, 2014, Anderson received a coaching for failing to report to work for an overtime shift that Anderson had volunteered to work.
On January 1, 2015, Anderson received a coaching for neglecting his responsibilities as a first responder after witnessing a motor vehicle accident involving an RTA coach. Anderson continued driving rather than stopping to provide assistance to injured passengers.
On August 5, 2016, Anderson received a coaching for allowing a person to ride without proof of payment purchase or validation of fare and failing to take any enforcement action.
On August 5, 2016, Anderson received a First Written Warning for a disruptive, disrespectful and unprofessional outburst directed at Anderson’s supervising officer during the Republican National Convention. He yelled, among other things, “You disgust me. The very thought of you is disgusting to me and your presence sickens me.”
On January 25, 2017, Anderson received a coaching for failing to address the resistive and disorderly behavior of a fare violater at the Tower City Rapid Station.
On April 12, 2017, Anderson received a coaching for failing to attend to scheduled court appearances.
On May 30, 2017, Anderson received another First Written Reminder for violation of Employee Performance Code for failing to maintain control of a suspect following an investigative detention.
On June 13, 2017, Anderson was charged with multiple misdemeanors following an off-duty incident with his girlfriend during which he allegedly assaulted her while he had his loaded service weapon unsecured in their hotel room.

Based on this history, the court had little difficulty dismissing Anderson’s claims:

Plaintiff was issued three (3) First Written Warnings and (2) two non-disciplinary coachings, each based on a particular circumstance of Plaintiff’s problematic or violative conduct. Plaintiff provides no direct evidence to support a finding that his discipline or termination were made because of his race. Plaintiff also fails to demonstrate how any similarly situated employee received more favorable treatment. The record does however support a finding that GCRTA’s actions against Plaintiff were made for legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons following Plaintiff’s unlawful conduct the morning of May 26, 2017 at the Double Tree Hotel.

This employer gave this employee a very long leash before ultimately terminating his employment. Your leash may not, and likely need not, be this long.

However, no matter the length of your leash, you must ensure it’s documented and communicated to the employee each step of the way. Otherwise, you are asking for a lawsuit and issues in said lawsuit post-termination.

June 8, 2019June 29, 2023

5 Myths Surrounding Women in the Indian Workplace

“If one man can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it?” — Malala Yousafzai

Women in India constitute 48.4 percent as compared to 51.6 percent of men in the total Indian population of 1.37 billion people.

A good ratio, right? Moreover, according to international non-governmental organization Catalyst, Indian women access higher education at the same rates as men at 27 percent.

But the ratios are not in favor of women when it comes to their participation in the workplace. Research by Catalyst notes that “only about 29 percent of Indian women work compared to 82 percent of Indian men.”

Indian women are in order first and foremost supposed to be a devoted wife, a doting mother and then a working professional. Women in India are expected to conform to traditional and societal norms.

Family always has to come before work. Women in India also have to be present and represent every ritual and cultural function conducted. And the older a female gets in India, the more she is bound in a “double burden syndrome” — balancing home and work.

But even women who get to join the workforce are not free of facing stereotypes and harassment. Women are rarely offered C-suite roles and similarly lofty positions.

There’s a lot that people hold against women in the workplace. It’s time to shatter the myths associated with women in the workplace and help increase their workplace participation.

Myth: Women Can’t Negotiate

The gender wage gap is the highest in India, according to Indian English-language daily Business Standard. Women in India are paid 34 percent less than what an Indian man is paid in the workplace, according to a research conducted by the International Labour Organization.

The prevailing explanation as to why women don’t earn as much as men is that “women aren’t aggressive enough.” People say that women don’t push their employers hard enough to give them a raise or that they can’t negotiate.

That’s not true. Women are as assertive as men when asking for salary appraisal. More and more studies in 2019 are showing that the rate of women and men asking for salary is the same. But, the conversion rates still favor male employees over women.

Myth: Too Emotional or Too Cold

In higher-level managerial positions, women often face a double bind. When they portray female characteristics, they are termed as emotional or sensitive. But when they follow traditional leadership roles, they are perceived as too difficult or too cold.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, the director of Northeastern University’s Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory, said that emotions are not something that we are born with but are rather created according to circumstances. And in India, women are groomed to be delicate, fragile and sensitive to situations. Therefore, it can be said that portraying high emotional intelligence is not biological but rather a social construct.

Myth: Women Don’t Belong in STEM

According to UNESCO, only 30 percent of women in India participate in STEM-related fields in higher education. What’s more disheartening is that the dropout rate among women in technology is even higher in junior to midlevel positions. Across Asia, the dropout rate is 29 percent.

Another reason why women continue to remain underrepresented in STEM fields begins very early in childhood.

Women are associated with arts and languages and men with math and science. When given a mathematical examination, women are under a lot more pressure to succeed than men. When applying this institutional fear toward a workplace full of men, it adversely

Myth: Women Are Only Good at Soft Skills

This is a judgment held against women, especially in the engineering field. Soft skills involve communication, creativity, adaptability, flexibility and teamwork. These are skills that every individual who works with other people needs to possess irrespective of profession and gender. To be a successful engineer, one needs to have both technical as well as soft skills.

Myth: Sexual Harassment Is a Woman’s Issue

The number of registered cases against sexual harassment in the workplace increased 54 percent from 371 cases in 2014 to 570 in 2017, according to the independent Indian English-language news site Scroll.in. But, as it is in most cases, the majority of these reported cases were from women. Due to maximum cases being reported by women, people assume that women are subject to harassment and therefore it’s “their issue” and they should resolve it on their own.

Sexual harassment doesn’t limit itself to a gender. While it’s important to understand that, it’s also important for people to stand by each other when such cases are reported. Men and women should be allies when someone reports against a “higher-up” or report when they have witnessed something.

Instead of holding their social conditioning against them, let’s all try to build a workplace in India where everyone has the same opportunities and treatment irrespective of their gender.

June 6, 2019

Relational Intelligence Can Give Companies a Leg Up

There’s a difference between how people behave in their personal life and how they behave professionally. But businesses can learn something from the tactics people use to repair personal relationships, according to therapist and author Esther Perel.

One of the speakers at the Unleash 2019 conference in Las Vegas in May, Perel has extensive experience counseling couples. She consults organizations on conflict resolution as well.

“As couples’ therapists, we have wide familiarity working with polarized systems,” Perel said. “I know [how] to work with relationships where one person doesn’t believe a word the other person is saying. That’s what couples who are arguing do. So we actually have an enormous amount of experience helping companies.”

Her session at Unleash focused on how organizations can use some of the tenets of couples counseling in their workplace when it comes to working on the relationship between the employer and the employee. She also spoke after the session to answer more questions on relationships in the workplace.

Perel prefers the term “relational intelligence” over the oft-used term “emotional intelligence.” That’s because it’s not a self-referential concept, she said. Rather, it’s knowing how to deal with other people and become in tune with the needs of other.

This skill set is especially important after #MeToo, she said. Now, she added, “there’s tremendous anxiety and restlessness in the workplace about how we relate to each other, how we establish boundaries and how we deal with disagreements breaches of trust.”

People carry narratives about relationships that influence their expectations from an interaction and their interpretations of the situation they’re in. Perel calls this their “relationship resume.” People come to work with this past. Were they raised to be trusting or suspicious? Did they grow up in a household where they were taught to ask for help or figure things out on their own? Do they prefer to work collaboratively or alone?

Answers to questions like this help explain what kind of team member a person will be, Perel said. That’s a missing set of questions that employers don’t consider when they hire.

Understanding boundaries is another key relational intelligence skill useful in both personal and professional relationships.

“These days we have narrowed the definition of boundary and we have sexualized it,” Perel said. But really the term “boundary” refers to a much broader scope of situations. Boundaries in sexual situations are just a small piece of it.

In the workplace, boundaries exist in any team. This can show itself in many ways. It’s the difference between an employee who’s involved in everyone’s business and the employee who hardly interacts with any colleagues. It’s the difference between teams that act like a secret society and teams with more “porous” boundaries.

There are several key boundary questions that exist in a team. They include, Who’s involved in this project? Who needs to say what to whom? What needs to be shared, and what can be kept to oneself? How much can you be absent for three days without anyone noticing? What is private versus what is shared? And what are decisions you make alone versus decisions for which you need to ask your manager permission?

When Perel is consulting organizations, she relies on the concept of “polarity management,”“an approach to conflict resolution that’s about identifying and managing unsolvable problems,” to communicate with her client.

The specifics of how to use polarity thinking warrants its own article. Looking at it more broadly, though, Perel explained some of the key tenets behind it. Before you tell someone what they’re doing wrong you tell them what they’re doing right. Also, you acknowledge that you know what losses someone will face by doing something different.

“Before you go directly from here to here and say, ‘This is wrong, you need to do that,’ you first address the loss. Every change comes with loss,” Perel said.

June 6, 2019June 29, 2023

An Obituary for Employment At-will

Over at her employee-rights blog, Screw You Guys, I’m Going Home, attorney Donna Ballman asks, “Is is time to terminate at-will employment laws?”

Well Donna, there’s no need to terminate these laws; they are already dead. I hear it all the time from clients. “Aren’t we an at-will employer? We paid you for that handbook that says so. Why can’t we fire this employee. This is *!%#*!”

Yes, your employees are at-will. And that and a hill of beans will get you sued.

Employment at-will is dead. Do you have the right to fire an employee for no reason? Absolutely. Yet, if that employee is African-American, Other-American, a woman (or a man), pregnant or recently pregnant, suffering from a medical condition (or related to someone with a medical condition, or you think has a medical condition but doesn’t), on a medical leave or returning from a leave, injured, religious, older (i.e., age 40 or above), LGBTQ, serving in the military or a veteran, or a whistleblower or otherwise a complainer, the law protects their employment. Which means that if you fire them, you better have done so for a good reason.

If you look at those categories, most of your employees fall under one of more of them. In other words, while you are an “at-will employer,” that doesn’t really mean anything anymore. Employees just have too many protections.

So, how do I suggest you respond? Follow the Platinum Rule of Employee Relations. Treat your employees as they would want to be treated. If you treat your employees as they would want to be treated (or as you would want your wife, kids, parents, etc. to be treated), most employment cases would never be filed, and most that are filed would end in the employer’s favor. Juries are comprised of many more employees than employers, and if jurors feel that the plaintiff was treated the same way the jurors would expect to be treated, the jury will be much less likely to find in the employee’s favor.

What does this mean for your poor performing employees? Does they understand the performance problems? Were they given sufficient counseling and warnings before termination? And, most importantly, can you prove it via contemporaneous documentation? If so, there is no reason to give poor performance a pass just because of the risk of a lawsuit. Otherwise? I’d think long and hard before firing.

So let’s all raise a glass and toast employment at-will. It had a good ride.

June 6, 2019June 29, 2023

The DMV and Cybersecurity

I spent way too much of a recent Saturday morning at the local department of motor vehicles. My plates were expiring and I had forgotten to take advantage of online registration.

So there I found myself at 10 a.m. waiting in line. To be fair, it was the “express” line, designated for registration renewals only. My experience, however, was less than express, thanks to the patron two spots ahead of me.

On her turn, the clerk asked for information stored in some account on her phone. She did not, however, remember the necessary password. She then removed an inch-thick flipbook of Post-it notes, each containing a login and password to a different account.

I watched her rifle through the stack. Ten minutes of life that I will never regain, with my frustration mirrored on the faces of everyone else in line.

One of the top cybersecurity tips is to maintain proper password security. Storing passwords on a notepad or stack of sticky notes does not qualify as secure. What does?

• Using passwords with differing types of characters.

• Avoiding the most common passwords (like “Pa$Sw0rD”).

• Setting a regular schedule to change passwords (although some research shows that most people use near identical passwords when forced to switch).

Four issues warrant additional discussion.

First, do not reuse the same passwords across multiple accounts. If one account is hacked, you’ve exposed every other account for which you’ve used the same password.

Recently, for example, Intuit disclosed that its TurboTax product had suffered just such an attack. The criminal accessed TurboTax user accounts by taking usernames and passwords it had stolen from a non-Intuit source to attempt TurboTax logins.

For those with which it was successful, the criminal was able to obtain sensitive tax return information. (If you want to know if one or more of your online accounts has been compromised, check out haveibeenpwned.com.)

If you are not going to reuse the same password across multiple accounts, how will you generate and remember hundreds of different and complex passwords? The answer brings us to point number two. Use a password manager.

A password manager is an online service that stores all of your passwords (encrypted on their end). All you need to do to unlock the password for any given account is to recall the lone master password you have chosen for your password manager of choice. Passwords are also synced across devices.

The top competitors offer variations on the same service. Compare and contrast pricing, what each offers and pick one. The money you spend on an annual subscription pales exponentially to what you will spend undoing the damage caused by an account compromised by a weak password.

The question I get most often regarding password managers? “Aren’t you worried about them being hacked?”

Technically yes, but functionally no. At least one has been hacked without the exposure of even a single user password because all of the stored data is highly encrypted.

If you are comparing the security of reusing passwords or using different password but storing them in a notebook or sticky-note flipbook versus a password manager, the security choice is clear.

Third, check your URLs and only input account information on sites that use HTTPS web encryption.

HTTPS provides an encrypted online session between you and whichever site you are visiting. With a non-HTTPS site, everything you send is visible to anyone on the same network. Even safer, use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to create a secure channel between your computer and the internet.

Finally, use two-factor authentication for any account that offers it.

Two-factor authentication, or 2FA, requires a user to input a unique code sent to a device of choice (usually by text message) any time they log in to an account from a new device. 2FA is not foolproof.

For example, it does not take much skill for even a low-level cybercriminal to steal a phone number and intercept the code. More complexly, criminals can use social engineering to ape one’s identity and trick a mobile company to send a new SIM card to the attacker, diverting all 2FA text messages to the criminal’s mobile device.

Thus, while one should not rely on 2FA as the only method to secure one’s account, it’s added layer of security certainly can’t hurt.

No one is immune from being hacked. However, taking a few simple (albeit mildly inconvenient) steps to secure your passwords and accounts will go a long way to mitigating against this very serious and costly risk.