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| Risk Management |
| Sabotaging: Could your Employees be Sabotaging your Company... |
Helpfully, Penny answers all of the telephone surveyor’s questions. Hanging up, she wonders if she should have responded to those last two questions.
At a trade show, Gary engages in an exciting, knowledgeable conversation with someone who represents himself as a potential client, but who, Gary later learns, is a competitor.
It’s called “economic espionage,” or “theft of intellectual property.” Many of the “trade secrets” you use to make informed decisions on finance, operations, research and development, marketing, personnel, and executive management are valuable to your competitors. And they’re easily extracted from your employees.
Take steps to protect your company from economic espionage. Save your employees from the embarrassment or harsh consequences of inadvertent sabotage.
- Identify information your company considers proprietary intellectual property.
- Implement appropriate policies. Put your company’s policies concerning intellectual property in writing.
- Train your employees what information your organization considers confidential and what your policies are concerning that information. Apprise them of ploys that may be used to extract information from them or innocent mistakes that may breach confidentiality.
- Limit authorized access and prohibit unauthorized access to confidential information. An employee who does not work with sensitive information should not have access to it.
- Impose reasonable sanctions for violations. Courts often interpret setting policies without corresponding training and enforcement as an indication that the business does not consider the protected information sufficiently important.
- Require and keep a signed compliance document from each trained employee. It should include a synopsis of the information considered confidential as well as sanctions for violations. Make it impossible for an employee to say, “I didn’t know…,” or “they never told me….”
Information is power. In today’s technological environment, your business’s knowledge base needs protection.
(Source: James P. Kerins III “Intellectual Property” HR Forum.)
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