Ways to Keep Your Company's Data Safe When Employees Leave

It’s a fact that employees are bound to leave the company at some point in time. They cannot stay in your company forever. Once they find a better opportunity at some other organization, they might leave your company.

As an employer, it is your responsibility to make sure that when your employees leave the company, they do not take the company’s sensitive and confidential data along with them. Have you ever thought about what steps would you take to protect your company’s data from employees who are leaving your company?

Installing the best free hidden spy apps for Android is one thing that you can do to protect your company’s data from employees who are leaving your company, and there are also other options you can consider.

Ideally, employees decide to leave the company under friendly circumstances. They do not want to leave the company on a bad note and create problems with their employer. Unfortunately, employees do not always leave the company in an ideal situation. Often, employees leave the company on rather bad terms.  

If the employee leaves the company on bad terms, they would likely attempt to put the company at risk or try to sabotage the company’s reputation by leaking confidential information about the organization. According to a recent survey, it has been seen that 31% of companies have led employees to quit their jobs because of data breaches.

Protect Company’s Data When Employees Leave

Below, we have mentioned some steps that a company can take to ensure that your company’s data does not leak when your employee decides to resign or when you terminate them.

Revoke Employee’s Access to IT Systems and Premises

Employers should take steps to make sure that the employees that leave the company should not get any access to the company’s IT systems and premises. The access to the company’s electronic devices and IT systems should be revoked the day they decide to leave the company.

In an ideal situation, the employers should do that as soon as possible at a reasonable time, especially at the date of resignation, termination, or at the beginning of their garden time. Employers should also make sure that they need to revoke their employees’ access to everything at the company’s premises including electronic devices and IT systems.

By doing this, a company can minimize the risk of the leaving employee stealing the company’s sensitive and confidential data or gaining access to the company’s devices and IT systems even after they leave the company.

Impose the Garden Leave

Depending on the terms and conditions of the contract, many employers grant employees that are leaving the company garden leave, irrespective of whether they are joining an opponent company or not. Garden leave is granted when an employee resigns from the company and is required to stay away from doing work during the notice period while still being employed and remaining on the payroll of the company.

This step is extremely useful as it prevents an employee from immediately joining the opponent company and also minimizes the risk of exposing confidential information to the new company. This step can be implemented on all the high-level employees to protect the company’s data.

Monitor Employees’ Activities

Another step that you can take to ensure your company’s data is not at risk because of leaving employees is that you deploy monitoring solutions in the workplace to monitor the actions and activities of those employees before they leave.

For instance, you can monitor their activities including web browsing history, social media activity, texts, emails, instant chats, and even phone calls. You can also maintain a record of all the files they download from the internet and then also monitor all their incoming and outgoing messages.

All employers need to put the employee monitoring policy in the company employee handbook so that they can educate their employees on how and why they will use the policy for protecting the company’s confidential information.

It is important that employees do not feel that they are not trusted by the company and that their supervisors are not watching their every move, including the activities they do after working hours come to an end. To monitor employees’ activities effectively, employers can install the best hidden spy apps for Android or iPhone on their employees’ smartphones.

Backup All Data

The employer should make sure to take the backup of the company’s data and archive it. There are several companies that already have backup and archiving solutions set in place, especially for email. However, they are not aware of the storage solutions that might be managed and kept by individuals or teams of employees.

It’s important that the marketing department of the company should be aware of all the storage solutions their employees are using in the company. To avoid employees from using their own storage and archiving solutions, the company should use cloud storage solutions and regularly backup and archive the data.

Communicate with Your Employees

In most situations, the employee who is leaving the company may get in touch with other employees in the company and try to convince them to leave as well. It is important to communicate with your employees so that there is no misunderstanding between you and the other employees.

You should also tell them that such behavior won’t be acceptable. If they try to be influenced by the leaving employee then they might put their own job in jeopardy. With data breaches and cyberattacks becoming widespread in the workplaces, in addition to a handful of revengeful employees, companies must take extra precautionary measures to protect the company’s data whenever an employee decides to leave the company.

It can be an extremely tedious task for employers but they need to enforce all the above-mentioned steps to safeguard the company’s data from employees that leave the company on bad terms. Since you do not want to put your company’s reputation at stake, you should take extra precautions to keep your company’s data safe from everything.

Mobistealth is the best employee monitoring software that you can consider deploying in your workplace. Using this monitoring solution, you can keep eyes on your employees’ activities during working hours and prevent them from taking part in illegal activity.