New research from Kaspersky reveals 25% of employees
in North America confirmed that they have pretended their devices were
installing updates so they would not have to attend a call or meeting. This
excuse is believable as software updates are known to disrupt workdays, with
one-third (37%) of employees saying they have been late to a call because of
updates.
Frequent meetings are often seen as one of the most unpleasant things in the
office routine. The transition to remote work and virtual meetings hasn't
helped the issue, as people experienced fatigue from
video calls and felt more tired at the end of the working day. As the
recent Kaspersky research shows, some employees found an excuse to skip some of
their calls by pretending that their work devices were unavailable due to
updates.
Colleagues often believe this to be true as they may relate
to the experience of needing to update a device themselves. In addition to
missed appointments, 37% of employees have lost part of their unsaved work or
data when their PC or laptop restarted after installing updates.
Alternatively, some employees see device downtime updates as
an opportunity to procrastinate, with 32% of respondents admitting that they
have installed updates to deliberately waste time at work. Nevertheless,
employees mostly don't like it when their work day is interrupted with 56% of
respondents saying they wish updates happened outside of work hours to maintain
their productivity.
"Typically, updates are downloaded during working hours in
silent mode and do not affect a business," comments Egor Kharchenko, IT service
and asset group manager at Kaspersky. "However, to apply them to the system, a
restart is required. Of course, some business matters can't be postponed, so
usually a user can restart within a certain timeframe. As we can see, some
people either miss such notifications or do not want to do this. Therefore, the
required restart may happen at the most inconvenient moment, right before an
important call or when they are writing a long email."
To make updates convenient for employees and IT
administrators, Kaspersky recommends IT departments do the following:
- Plan updates closer to the end of the workday, when
devices are still on and can download required updates, but employees'
activity is typically lower.
- If possible, use wake-on-LAN. This technology allows
workstations to be turned on through the network, so updates can be
downloaded outside of working hours.
- Divide users into several groups, including a test one.
Update them one by one, so the IT department can help everyone in a timely
manner if something goes wrong.
- Inform the staff about the AutoSave function available
in some office productivity software - it will automatically save all
their changes.
- Install an endpoint protection solution with patch
management features, like Kaspersky
Endpoint Security for Business. Additionally, behavior detection and
exploit prevention technologies don't allow malefactors to leverage
unpatched security issues.
To read the full report, please visit this link.