Yes, employee turnover exists and it is a gruesome fact for any business. In fact, it is one of the gravest nightmares for businesspersons. Irrespective of the type of work culture an organisation boasts, employee turnover is something that one cannot ignore. However, dissatisfied employees walking out of your company can become chaotic if not approached in the right manner.
There is need to have diligent protocols in place when it comes to dealing with a layoff for every employee who exits. Often, this process involves calculating the recoverables and repossessing company property such as tablets, smartphones etc. from the employees. Whilst this process goes in a smooth way most of the times, but in case of a dissatisfied employee, who is not leaving on ideal terms, several problems may pop up that can jeopardise your company’s reputation costing your business, to say the worst.
Here are three ways dissatisfied employees can throw a business off track:
1. They can steal critical workflow papers, business processes or spreadsheets
Many organisations these days toil hard to ensure that their key business processes are secured and refined. As such, there are important documents/spreadsheets or trade secrets that assist these companies to maintain/retain efficiency and quality standards. When employees are laid off, they often tend to steal these critical documents with them. This is one major reason businesses today are breaking up with spreadsheets and moving to cloud based payroll solutions, since payroll is undoubtedly one of the critical and the most confidential processes for a company.
2. They can steal your clientele, customer or supplier lists
Your customers, clients and suppliers are loyal, but you certainly wouldn’t want their contact details and names going to a competitor. Often, dissatisfied employees tend to switch job and join a competitor. Now imagine your not so satisfied sales maverick joining a competitor. Thus, having a proper process in place to tackle such scenarios becomes a dire necessity for businesses.
3. They can steal your intellectual property, trademarks etc.
Be it your top-secret projects or your patents, it is the intellectual property, which distinguishes a business from its competitors. So for safeguarding intellectual property, several businesses make their employees sign non-disclosure agreements. Nevertheless, still many employees tend to violate these agreements after they leave a company on bad terms. Be it exporting critical spreadsheets or emailing the files through personal email, odds are quite high that a dissatisfied employee might attempt to steal the intellectual property to secure a job at a competing organisation.
Now the million-dollar question, how can this all put your business off track? A competing organisation when equipped with your intellectual property, list of clients and trade secrets, can snatch away your competitive edge. Simply put, when the very key thing that makes your business distinct from your competitors is leaked, you are doomed to lose money, market shares and a lot of business. This calls for having stringent exit policies and proactive processes in place to secure your intellectual property and trade secrets from going public. Human resource departments ought to devise a clear off-boarding policy in an effort to curb the collateral damage caused by a dissatisfied employee and to keep the business on-track.
To know how cloud technology can help mitigate such risks and prevent your business from going off track whilst also keeping turnover rate in check, contact us now. You can also write to us at sales@pockethrms.com or give us a shout out here Twitter or Facebook.
