No organization wants insiders stealing their assets, data, or knowledge—or worse, physically harming others. But ensuring security and safety is only the start. Today’s companies, governments, and militaries need to enable trust in order to excel. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you remember your first psychology class: safety comes first, but you need relationships and belonging before you can reach your full potential.
Recently, Clearspeed CEO Alex Martin joined security expert Chase Hughes and CSO and former FBI agent John Chesson in a panel discussion during the Behavioral Analytics Conference to talk about trust enablement. You can watch the full panel discussion here:
All three panelists have seen challenging security environments:
- Prior to co-founding Clearspeed, Alex Martin served in the U.S. Marine Corps leading infantry, reconnaissance and special operations units over 4 operational deployments and worked for two years in remote Kenya leading an NGO.
- Chase Hughes is a leading behavior expert in the United States. He’s worked in intelligence missions in multiple countries.
- During his time at the FBI, John Chesson was exposed to the aftermath of failed insider threat detection efforts which resulted in substantial businesses losses. He’s also conducted many background checks on thousands of individuals requiring clearance to access sensitive government information.
All three agree that humans are the weakest link in preventing insider threats and building trust. Hughes calls it “the Nigerian Prince Fallacy.”
In detecting insider threats, we humans have access to multiple historical data sources, things like financial and criminal records, credit scores, driving records, resumes, and social media. We check references. Experts like Hughes and Chesson spend years honing their skills at interviewing, observing, and assessing people.
Still, for most organizations in the private and public sectors, it’s not enough to know when an applicant, employee, partner, or vendor is showing signs of deception. It’s difficult to convince Human Resources, management, or colleagues that you’re not biased or overly aggressive. After all, you’re interpreting the existing data.
To move from investigating insider threats to enabling trust, Chesson needed a tool beyond the existing research and interview methods. He said,
“I needed a tool to provide an objective security risk assessment to independently examine the intent of an individual by asking a direct question set. If the tool could assess their answer to a direct question and conclude it alerted to a high risk for deception, then further investigation would be warranted or a risk avoidance decision could be made. In fact, my bias would no longer be a factor in the hire decision.”
For Chesson, voice analytics technology from Clearspeed provides that objective tool he needs. Voice analytics gives insight into current intent that Chesson needs to augment historical data at the start of a relationship. It also provides an effective, efficient tool for ongoing assessment that helps build and maintain an environment of trust.
Because it provides new, current, and objective data, voice analytics removes many possible objections about interpreting research and interview data.
That might sound euphemistic, or even rosy, but Hughes explained how objective voice analytics can impact relationships and even an organization’s culture.
Not only does Clearspeed voice analytics offer this incredible protective layer across an entirety of a group of people—it provides an unprecedented opportunity to connect with employees. The results from Clearspeed gives a reason to have conversations – conversations about things that would otherwise be incredibly difficult or hard to bring up. This not only adds security but provides a wonderful touchpoint for companies to discover the value in connecting with employees about issues – some of which could become dangerous and contagious to the company as a whole.
With the right tools and appropriate mindset, organizations can move from connecting the dots of suspicion to connecting with people to build rapport, enhance their culture, and enable trust.
To learn more about how Clearspeed enables trust, request a demo.