Try as we may to have it not happen, sometimes (for good reason or bad) managers will terminate an employee, or an employee decides to quit. Either way, it’s usually not a good thing, If they were a great employee, you are losing a valuable asset. If not-so-great, you have wasted time and money invested in training them for your needs.
No matter which of these scenarios is the case, there are three very important things you should do to safeguard your business against loss of data, intellectual property and possible security threats.
- On the front end, make sure your employee on-boarding agreement includes the stipulation that work issued devices (computers, laptops, phones, etc.) are company property and not for personal use. If personal use is taken or allowed, there are no privacy rights in the event of employment termination. Essentially, you’re saying anything on this device is subject to removal by the company at termination.
- Make a complete backup on all work issued devices and then wipe them clean for safe re-purposing.
- Make sure that any and all passwords the employee had access to are changed or deleted for both internal and external facing assets or accounts. There are some really easy and effective ways to manage these things, but we’ll save that for another post.
The bottom line is, you need to have a solid process and procedures in place for employees who are heading out the door. We need to put as much effort into the off-boarding process as we do when we’re welcoming them in on their first day.
If you want to learn more about how to create air-tight security for ALL of your company data and property, please give us a call. As the popular saying goes; we’ve got an app for that!