Yahoo! lost $350 million to their sale price after the reveal that a security breach had caused 3 billion accounts to be compromised. They learned the hard way that if you have sensitive data you’ll also need measures to protect it.

You need an easy way to secure your processes without providing extra hoops for your team to jump through and get confused over.

That’s why we here at Process Street let you set task permissions in your checklists.

This feature lets you hide tasks from viewers with variable permission levels within your checklists. You’re left with a checklist that shows different tasks to different people based on what you think they should see.

The best thing? It solves your security and clarity issues while providing a singular location for your data to be stored, making it easy to review.

Enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it!
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If you want to grow your business, you need to know how to allocate your resources to make it happen. How do you figure out the steps you need to take, or the processes you need to implement to make it happen?

You conduct a gap analysis.

Simply put, the gap analysis is a tool designed to help you understand where you are, and what you need to do in order to get to where you want to be.

In this article, I’ll be breaking down the basics and running through a process for getting started with performing your first gap analysis.

Here’s what this Process Street article has in store:

• What is a gap analysis? In simple terms
• Common use cases for gap analysis
• Different types of gap analysis
• The gap analysis process
• Gap analysis tools
• How to streamline the gap analysis process

Let’s get started.

What is a gap analysis?

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Jennifer Lockman graduated from UCLA majoring in Journalism. Now she works as a writer. Her expertise includes general education, e-learning, business, writing, and lifestyle.

Being a manager often puts you in a difficult position.

It isn’t always about smiling and cheering for your employees. It also means that you have to right the wrongs, and come face to face with unpleasant situations.

While there are countless ways to motivate the team and encourage them to attain success, when it comes to tackling the hurdles along the way not all managers have the knack for it.

Of course, one could try to instigate the fear of getting fired if you displease the manager, but that might not be the most effective way to approach a conflict with an employee. Nor is letting them assume that the manager is a pushover.

So if you are dreading that meeting you should have had a long time ago, we are here to tell you what to avoid and how to approach the situation. With adequate communication, a confrontation could help build stronger relationships in the office and boost performance.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover 11 common mistakes managers make when confronting their employees and provide you with a host of process templates to try to make your life easier!

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Workplace diversity is more than a buzzword. It’s also more than a passing phenomenon.

Whether it’s findings from MIT proving that having an equal gender balance increases revenue, or McKinsey’s discovery that companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity have a 35% increase in financial returns above the national average, diversity positively affects both a company’s culture and bottom-line.

At Process Street, we recognize the importance of diversity, but we also understand that improving diversity in the workplace isn’t an easy task for HR teams.

That’s why we’ve created these 8 free templates:

• Diversity Questions Survey
• Diversity Hiring Process
• Employee Complaint Procedure
• Diversity Training Process
• Diversity Management Monthly Audit
• Unconscious Bias Training Guide
• Diversity Initiatives Quarterly Improvement Process
• Code of Conduct Policy Adherence Process

However, before deep-diving into the templates, it’s crucial to have a solid understanding of exactly what diversity in the workplace is, and why it’s profoundly important. This will help you get the maximum possible value from our templates.

With that being said, let’s get started!

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In 2018, we saw more than 3.8 billion email users worldwide. 3.8 billion and increasing. That is almost half the worlds population on email.

From this statistic, Process Street gives to you both good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a fantastic method to communicate with your customers.

The bad news?

Business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 293 billion in 2019, which is forecast to grow to over 347 billion in 2023.

Email after email multiplied into the billions loses your line of communication to the spam folder.

How do you make sure your emails are noticed and stand out from this crowd? The answer, by sending follow up emails.

In this Process Street article, we will look at the basics of follow up emails. We provide email templates to help you get started and processes for follow up email campaigns.

We will help you stand out.

In this article you’ll find:

• Who needs a follow up email?
• How to write a follow up email.
• Why do you need to write follow up emails?
• Five follow up email templates.
• How to write an email campaign.
• How you can use Process Street to help your email campaign.

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What exactly is an “audit“?

The International Organization for Standardization defines it as:

“[the] systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.” – ISO, from ISO 19011:2018 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

That’s another way of saying someone takes a look at what you’re doing, gathers some evidence, and compares that evidence to what you’re supposed to be doing (in other words, a set of clearly documented requirements).

In the case of ISO, these requirements are known as standards. ISO 9001 is a standard. ISO 14001 is a standard.

Importantly, this understanding of audit implies that there are a few main things being considered by the auditor:

• What’s documented by the company (e.g. internal processes, policies, and SOPs)
• Evidence gathered to support how these policies, procedures, and SOPs are implemented in practice
• The requirements defined by the ISO standard being audited against (e.g. ISO 9001)

Audits performed by companies to assess and analyze their own management systems are known as internal audits. Many resources for guiding companies on how to perform internal audits exist, and foremost of these is the ISO 19011 standard.

For most management system standards, internal audits are an important requirement. Even guideline standards like ISO 26000 for social responsibility depend on reports to evidence the success of their implementations.

As such, ISO 19011 defines a set of guidelines; a framework for companies to plan, implement, and improve upon their audit programs, for auditing the implementation of management systems.

Since the first edition of ISO 19011 was published in 2002, many new management system standards have been published.

These standards often share a common structure, including certain requirements, terms, and definitions being used. That means ISO 19011 can be used to devise highly economic audit programs, wherein knowledge and processes can be shared and applied across various management systems.

By considering how they might take a broader approach to management system auditing and integration, companies implementing ISO management systems stand to save time, money, and confusion when preparing for and implementing internal audits.

The goal of this post is to provide a spring-board for understanding ISO 19011, and how to get started with internal ISO auditing. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is ISO 19011
• 7 principles of ISO auditing
• Different types of ISO audit
• Key elements of an ISO audit
• 8 free ISO audit templates

If you just want the free ISO audit templates, then here they are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Checklist for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 9001:2015 Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
• ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility Performance Assessment Checklist
• ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISO 27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9004:2018 for Sustainable Success in QMS Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist

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The following is a guest post by Alex Mitchell, a cybersecurity enthusiast, WordPress guru, and data-safety tools tester with over 10 years experience.

Everybody knows the phrase, ‘Big Brother is watching.’

What often goes unsaid, though, is that Big Brother can be anyone, including the amateur hacker who happens to be staying at the same hotel as you.

That amateur hacker can’t watch if he can’t see. He knows this, of course, and he has ways of tricking you into letting him see.

Not only this, but all hackers know that a traveling employee most likely has access to sensitive company information on their laptop. These individuals make the best targets because there is more to gain from them.

In this Process Street article, we’ll take a look at risks such as these (and more) that are faced by traveling employees and how to remedy them. In particular, we’ll cover:

• Defense against hackers
• Safety while using public hotspots
• Password security
• Data protection during border checks

Let’s get into it

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Sometimes we all need a helping hand, whether it be choosing a meal at a restaurant or figuring out how to achieve our career ambitions.

When it comes to life itself, well, most of us are never really sure if we are on the right track, especially in today’s world where opportunities are endless and everything is moving at breakneck speed.

It can all feel rather overwhelming.

An increasingly popular method of addressing the general hardships of life is to work with a life coach – somebody tasked with helping you identify your goals and developing an actionable plan to achieve them.

In short, life coaches are there to help you address the big issues and challenges that life presents, so you can move forward with your head held high.

On the other hand, by taking on the role of a life coach, you must possess the qualifications, skill, and expertise to effectively encourage your clients to clarify their ambitions and provide them with the tools they need to pursue them.

We’ve gone ahead and created 5 checklists designed to empower life coaches and their clients so that both parties get the most out of the coaching process.

3 of the checklists are modeled after processes created by a handful of world-renowned life coaches – Brian Tracy, Lisa A. Romano, and Tony Robbins. The remaining two are more general checklists that can be used in almost any context.

If you want to dive in and go straight to the checklists, there are quick links right below. Otherwise, scroll down for a brief intro to each one.

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“What is employee engagement?“

I’d been explaining the ins-and-outs of my job to my family for a while but here I had to stop to give more detail. That’s when it hit me.

To most people, employee engagement is jargon.

They see it as an airy concept that doesn’t have a solid definition – it’s something that marketers point at to sell products and nothing more.

The reality couldn’t be further from that.

Employee engagement is a vital statistic which can show the overall health of a business at every level. If you can affect it, it can result in massive benefits such as a 67% lower employee turnover rate and 21% higher productivity.

It’s time to learn what employee engagement is, how to measure it, and what you can do about it.

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Hacking is constantly misunderstood in pop culture.

From an 11-year-old crashing Wall Street and flying through 3D landscapes in Hackers to “hacking” an entire city in Watch Dogs, it’s easy to see why it’s seen as an extreme and dangerous hobby to have.

In reality, there are plenty of “white-hat” (well-intentioned) hackers who help companies to identify security weaknesses in their programs through bug bounties.

So, to de-mystify the air around bug bounty programs and white-hat hacking, this post will show you:

• What bug bounties are
• How you can start earning money through them
• What to consider when setting up your own bug bounty program
• 20 examples of top bug bounty programs you can take inspiration from or take part in yourself

Let’s get started.

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