By Hamed Mahmoud
As much as 90% of IT Security staff in META (Middle East, Turkey, Africa) region engage in leisure activities during working hours. Typically, these hobbies account for six hours a week, which is an hour more than staff across the company overall. A reason for these breaks may be to find a distraction from high workloads, which was also cited as the most common reason to leave a cybersecurity job. These are findings extracted from a new Kaspersky report titled ‘Managing your IT security team’.
Cybersecurity can involve routine and repetitive tasks, which affects both productivity and motivation to work. A shift to remote work has further blurred the lines between working and personal time. This combination of factors can lead to situations where employees are often distracted from work.
Kaspersky’s report surveyed more than 5,200 IT and cybersecurity practitioners in META region. According to the research, among the most common activities IT security staff participated in at work included reading the news (37%), watching videos on YouTube (44%), and watching films or TV series (31%). A third of the respondents managed to do physical exercise (35%) and read professional literature (30%).
“I don’t think that it’s an issue that employees are distracted from work. There should be control over task performance, not how many working hours are spent on a hobby. Also, it may be normal for people to watch videos, as it may give insights into how to solve a problem. All in all, if work is not interesting for someone and there is a lack of task management, an employee will find a way to do something different, even from the office,” – comments Andrey Evdokimov, Head of Information Security at Kaspersky.
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