A new data analysis indicates that half of surveyed organizations issue formal warnings or disciplinary actions to employees who make inadvertent mistakes
Organizations in South Africa approach employee cybersecurity errors with divided strategies, splitting their responses between educational support and formal punishment. KnowBe4, a provider of security awareness training platforms, released a data analysis showing that half of the surveyed companies address inadvertent mistakes with coaching or learning support.
The remaining organizations combine educational support with formal written warnings or apply direct disciplinary actions, including suspensions, demotions or loss of privileges. This distribution mirrors global patterns rather than presenting an isolated regional trend.
The findings originate from regional data collected for the vendor’s global report, “From Agentic Risk to Human Wins: Building a Culture of Security in the Era of Agentic AI.” Previous assessments of this dataset highlighted corporate exposure to deepfake-driven scams and ungoverned artificial intelligence agents. The current analysis shifts the focus to internal enterprise incident response models. While the survey found that zero South African organizations would terminate a worker for an inadvertent error, the reliance on punitive measures creates potential operational vulnerabilities.
“An employee who has just sat through a disciplinary process for an honest mistake is an employee who will think twice before flagging the next one,” says Anna Collard, CISO advisor at KnowBe4 Africa. “That hesitation is where the real damage happens, because the phishing click reported within minutes is a minor incident, but the same click, hidden out of fear, can sit undetected for weeks.”
The security vendor recommends that enterprises distinguish between negligence and honest errors, treating an initial mistake as a training signal.
“None of our respondents said they would fire someone over a genuine mistake, and that restraint matters,” says Collard. “But half still formalise the consequence with a warning or discipline, and that is still a punishment from the employee’s point of view. If the goal is a workforce that reports problems the moment they happen, the response to a first honest mistake has to look more like coaching than a hearing.”
The report advises organizations to build supportive cultures and shift their management approach from tracking failures to reinforcing positive actions across human staff and artificial intelligence agents.
