Building a Stronger Phishing Resilience Culture

Phishing simulations are nearly universal in community banking. Regulators expect them. Auditors ask about them. Boards see the metrics. Yet despite higher training completion rates and more frequent testing, breach reports continue to start with the same phrase:

“A well‑intentioned employee…”

That phrase appears again and again, not because employees don’t care, but because phishing succeeds in normal work moments, not reckless ones. For many banks, the problem isn’t phishing simulations themselves. It’s the culture and design choices surrounding them.

The Reality: Most Phishing Incidents Don’t Look Like “Hacking”

When executives and the Board imagine a cyber event, they often picture:

• Advanced malware
• Sophisticated nation‑state attackers
• Systems being “broken into.”

But operational reality looks very different.

Most successful phishing incidents begin when:

• A trusted request arrives during a busy moment
• An employee feels pressure to respond quickly
• A workflow looks routine and familiar

Attackers don’t defeat security controls through advanced hacking techniques. Rarely are attackers sitting behind a screen typing away like the movies; instead, the attackers blend into business processes. That distinction matters because it changes how risk should be evaluated and managed.

Why Community Banks Are Uniquely Exposed

Community banking runs on strengths attackers love to exploit. Community banks pride themselves on building personal relationships and fast response times. And while these traits drive excellent customer service, they also create high‑trust, high‑urgency environments where phishing thrives. And this is the environment that attackers target and thrive in.

This isn’t a weakness.

It’s an operational reality that security measures should be designed around and is not something that can be simply trained away.

How The Human Brain Under Pressure (What Security Training Can’t Override)

Many studies show that human decision‑making optimizes for efficiency, not accuracy.

Under stress, people generally rely on:

• Habits,
• Pattern recognition; and
• Trusted shortcuts.

These behaviors make organizations run smoothly every day—and make social engineering effective during the few moments that matter most.

Training occurs in calm environments, whereas phishing occurs during live operations. And while most community financial institutions perform random phish testing, not all tests are created equal, and attackers are getting more and more sophisticated.

Expecting employees to perform perfect verification while juggling customers, deadlines, audits, and compliance tasks is unrealistic. This is not a discipline problem. It’s a decision‑environment problem.

The Hidden Risk of Traditional Phish Testing Programs

Many well‑intentioned phishing programs unintentionally reinforce risky behavior by sending mixed signals. It is common for employees to be rewarded for:

• Speed,
• Responsiveness,
• Saying “yes” and
• Solving problems quickly.

Those same employees are then investigated or retrained for doing exactly that when something goes awry.

Over time, this creates quiet consequences, such as:

• Hesitation to report,
• Fear of embarrassment; and
• Delayed escalation.

In an incident response situation, delays increase the impact. Building a culture around security and transparency first, and speed and responsiveness second, gives employees a chance to pause and evaluate. A safe culture also removes those potential quiet consequences.

The Cultural Shift Banks Must Make

The majority of community financial institutions rely on the ‘old’ method of phishing resilience. This is where training is the control. Management expects training to lead to vigilance and sound decision-making processes. Warnings are added to messages and failures, and training is tracked and reported.

However, these can lead to inconsistent results, a negative culture, and a sense of false security. The program should be designed around reducing the reliance on employee decision-making processes, adding guardrails, and rewarding reporting.

This shift aligns directly with modern regulatory thinking: resilience over perfection, governance over blame.

This also means the metrics being tracked and reported may need to change.

Why Click Rates Are the Wrong Executive Metric

Boards and leadership teams often ask:

“Are our employees failing fewer phishing tests?”

That question misses the real risk driver. A mature phishing program doesn’t ask who clicked. Instead, it asks:

• How fast did we know?
• How safe is it to report uncertainty?
• How quickly do normal mistakes stop turning into incidents?

While previous metrics help with transparency, and are sometimes the only insights we have, when possible, management should consider tracking and reporting around:

• Median time‑to‑report,
• Percentage of simulations reported,
• Frequency of near‑miss reporting; and
• Reduction in urgency‑driven workflows.

While training completion is an important metric, it does not equal resilience.

Four Principles for a Healthier Phishing Culture in Community Banking

To build a healthier phishing culture, we can start with four simple principles to guide our process.

1. Make Reporting the Safest Action

   • Employees should not fear reporting a phishing email or compromise. It should be viewed as the safest option. This can be done by praising early reports, even false positives, and providing simple, visible reporting mechanisms.

2. Remove Security Decisions from High‑Stress Moments

   • If a process requires someone to “remember the rule” during urgency, it will eventually fail. Reduce pressure in everyday workflows by building it in through dual authorization, out-of-band verification, and deliberate time buffers for sensitive actions. Management should intentionally design the pressure out of the process.

3. Reduce Cognitive Load

   • Employees are already doing many tasks as part of their everyday workload. Employees shouldn’t be asked to perform forensic interpretation of phish emails, interpret technical clues, or decide “how bad” something looks. Instead, give employees clear triggers, repeatable reporting processes, and provide positive feedback and follow-up.

4. Measure Readiness, Not Compliance

   • Regulators are not looking for perfect phish testing or training completion scores; instead, they’re looking for evidence of risk management. Management can demonstrate program maturity by showing faster detection, earlier escalation, reduced impact, and a leadership report. Not only does this demonstrate effective management, but it also builds resilience.
     
     

The Executive Role in Phishing Risk

Phishing culture is shaped at the top. And Executives may unintentionally increase risk when they:

• Send urgent requests via email
• Bypass verification for convenience
• React negatively to delays caused by controls

Similar to revising employee workflows to reduce pressure and as a result risk, executives can also reduce risk when they normalize verification, praise reporting, support implemented guardrails (even when they are inconvenient), and model secure behavior.

At the end of the day, culture forms faster than policy, and culture is driven from the top down.

The Real Goal of Phish Testing

The goal is not perfect employees. The goal is resilient systems and processes that anticipate normal human behavior.

Mature security programs assume:

• Mistakes will happen,
• Pressure will exist, and
• Attackers will exploit normalcy.

As a result of these assumptions, mature programs can then design environments where those mistakes don’t become incidents.

Final Thought

Attackers design experiences that feel normal. As a result, banks must design environments that guide safer choices just as deliberately. If your phishing program creates fear instead of confidence or silence instead of early reporting, then it’s time to rethink the culture around it.

Security isn’t about catching people.

It’s about engineering resilience.

Contact Bedel Security to learn how we can help redesign your phishing program around reporting and recovery.