How Oké Groep trains cyber awareness with gaming

About Oké Groep

The Oké Groep is a multidisciplinary maintenance company. They specialize in architectural maintenance, cleaning and asbestos removal in the Greater Amsterdam and South Holland region in the Netherlands. With 100 of their own employees and several subcontractors, they are a major player in the market and take care of clients from various sectors including housing corporations, healthcare institutions and schools on a daily basis.

Challenge

After receiving a lot of phishing emails, Oké Groep decided to do a phishing test last year to test the cyber awareness of their employees. During this test, they sent fake emails to see how many would click a possibly harmful link. The result? 29.4% did, which was higher than expected. Even though they offered cyber awareness training via an e-learning tool, many of Oké Groep’s employees still weren’t equipped to recognize a cyber threat that could lead to a data breach.

That’s when Oké Groep knew they had to look for a better way to train their employees to become more aware of cyber threats and act accordingly.

Solution

One thing that stood out in the feedback that Oké Groep got from its team was that the cyber awareness training wasn’t effective. The e-learning material was dense and was full of long-winded and boring material. It was hard to take in that much information all at once. With only one training a year, it was even harder to retain all the information.

To offer cyber awareness training that was more engaging and recurring, Oké Groep introduced Guardey. Guardey uses gamification to train cyber awareness with weekly challenges that take up to three minutes to complete. It’s a fun way to learn about complex topics and it builds knowledge retention over time. There is a leader board that shows employees how well they’re doing compared to their team members, which adds a fun element of competition.

Value

After using Guardey for only a few weeks, three main values were defined:

Improved knowledge retention

Employees note that they feel more confident that what they’re learning sticks with them because they are doing a short challenge every week.

Increased engagement

The team is excited to do the challenge every week and see who is on top of the leaderboard.

Better phishing test scores

When Oké Groep did another phishing test recently, the scores had improved by 84%.