It’s common to let employees choose their own passwords, and it’s not something you’ll even have control over if you adopt a BYOD philosophy. However, you should really consider providing passwords yourself, either directly or through a password manager. It might seem like an unnecessary step, but you’ll reap several important security benefits.

1. Helps Enforce Strong Password Security

It’s perfectly possible for an employee to decide on a secure password independently, but it isn’t likely. Adopting strong password practices means staying away from standard words and number combinations, which can be hacked very quickly and easily using the right software. It’s important to understand that such hacking can result in an account takeover or the theft of sensitive data, leading to financial losses, identity theft, or even harassment. Therefore, if you provide the password yourself, then you can choose a random selection of letters, numbers, and symbols to reduce the risk of the password getting hacked.

2. Easier to Change Passwords

Effective password security goes beyond choosing a secure one – you’ll also want to make changes regularly. This can be a lot tougher when everyone chooses their own password – even if you do force a change, people may just use a slight variation of their current one. If you control password management directly, you can stipulate a change every few months or so to keep security tight.

3. Prevents the Sale of Credentials

Research has demonstrated that many employees would be willing to sell their business login credentials for a very low price. It’s a situation that’s hard to prevent entirely, but you can reduce the risk by providing passwords yourself. This means that you’ll be able to change up passwords when someone leaves you, and that’s exactly when they would be most likely to sell on the information.

4. Prevents Password Sharing

Even the most effective password loses its potency if it gets used across more than one device. Unfortunately, people will sometimes share passwords when you let them take care of this themselves, and that’s going to dramatically impact your cyber security. Instead, take the situation in hand yourself and provide passwords directly.