After the severance of an employment relationship, the company practically cannot control the employee, but ...

[Демитрий]

The company can’t practically control the employee after the severance of employment, therefore the only effective way to protect yourself is to take care in advance
There are employees whose dismissal is especially painful for business - these are key employees, line managers or top management. But simply dismissal is not so bad, it’s worse when such people carry away valuable information or begin to use experience against you.

Instructive story for the seed
Gentlemen’s agreements, like golden parachutes, do not work today - I checked this on myself. More than a year ago, the top manager left the team. He did not cope with the post of technical director - and first returned to work with clients. Of course, he was upset and soon announced his resignation. Saying goodbye, he shook hands and spoke of devotion. I thanked the person for 6 years of work, paid a “golden parachute” of several annual salaries, and after a few weeks I learned that he got a job with a competitor.


The verbal agreement not to compete came to an end, and the game began against: during the year we watched the ex-manager use the knowledge of our internal processes to advance in a new place. He turned to customers with competitive offers and used the contacts acquired in our company. But further - more: when his new employer could not solve the technical problem in his own product, the former director turned to our programmer. They proposed a development task and a reward, even drew up a contract. If we don’t find out about this, we could help our competitor with our own hands.



I am sure that every business has such stories. And, alas, neither agreement, nor money, nor even the law can insure against them. All that remains is proactive work.

Preparation: minimum program
First you’ll have to introduce the rules and document them. You have technical means and information resources - there should be a mode of their use. Let labor contracts, job descriptions and internal rules record that employees can use company information strictly to perform job duties. Separately, it will be necessary to prescribe the condition of non-disclosure of secrets: official, commercial, or that dictated by the specifics of the business.

The next step is to assign access rights and not allow those who should not be accessed to sensitive data. You do not leave the door wide open when you leave home? The same thing in the company. Conduct an audit, classify all corporate information and assign access rights. Let each employee freely access only the data that he needs for work.

Finally, implement a monitoring system that will let you know if the rules are violated. The market offers businesses many confidential information leakage prevention systems - DLP, SIEM, etc. Some programs simply block sending company secrets to wrong recipients. Others may do more: understand that the employee’s behavior is suspicious, conduct an investigation, find out the cause and eliminate the threat. Simply put, the former will block sending when the manager tries to merge the customer base. And the second ones will inform you in advance that the competitor has begun to hunt your employee and offers him more favorable conditions in exchange for information.

I'm leaving: operational action
According to the template procedure, it is possible to fire only line specialists who did not have secrets, were not critical to the organization, and cannot harm the company after leaving. Everything is relatively simple here: they signed papers, deprived of access, wished all the best - and returned to work. But in cases with key employees, there can be no universal script. Although, as soon as it becomes clear that the person will leave, the company has two goals: to calculate the risks and minimize the negative of the employee.


The action plan depends on why the specialist leaves. Who initiated the dismissal: you or him? If you, then, most likely, the employee will be offended, it is better to play it safe and immediately close access to critical information. If the initiative is up to the employee, context is important. Often partings go smoothly, a person simply leaves for another position, moves for family reasons or changes the scope of his activity. Understanding such motives, circumstances and context, no one cuts off access to an employee and does not scare heaven with punishment in case of a leak. On the contrary, it is worth thanks for the work, you can even offer to return if something does not suit you in a new place. But if an employee leaves with negativity, after information security incidents or with ballast from official misconduct, the situation requires more stringent measures. In each case, an individual approach will be optimal, but most often the basic actions look like this:

Put a person in special control

Because people can harm not only theft. For example, to set colleagues against leadership, to spoil the company's reputation in the media, or to fake documents. One of the clients shared a story when the offended chief accountant, leaving, deleted about 10,000 documents from the file server. If the company didn’t know about it, the story could have ended in bankruptcy. But the actions were stopped, the files were restored and the new employer was warned.

Close access to critical information

Because people carry her away. They believe that they have the right, because they have made an unbearable contribution. Or they see a pass to a new place of work in the data.

Report control and remind rights and obligations

According to KPMG research, in 71% of cases, fraud in Russian companies contributes to the weakness of internal control. That is, people break the rules, simply because they can do it with impunity. If you are not sure about the person, tell him about the control and remind him of responsibility for breaking the rules. Formulations such as “7 years of imprisonment and a fine of up to 1.5 million rubles” constrain from rash acts.

After leaving the employee to control the atmosphere in the team

Many of our clients faced a situation where a former employee continued to communicate with colleagues and skillfully lured information about the current affairs of the company. The team needs to be reminded periodically that friendship is friendship, and corporate secrets need to be protected.

Human factor

Today, much has been done to combat information leakage and unfair competition: specialized software is created and implemented, security policies are developed, laws are adopted to protect company and customer data. All this significantly reduces the risk of data loss. Why is information still being stolen and corporate fraudsters still exist?

Because the most unstable factor in this equation is always a person who is difficult to digitize or predict. Although attempts to profile employees and predict their behavior are made by more and more companies. But a top manager, even if he closes his access, can carry out strategic plans or company developments “in his head”. And the only way to avoid being bought by competitors is through a non-competition agreement. Only, alas, in Russian law, unlike English, there is no such practice yet.
Source: https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/