Exiting Employee Checklist: Legal Hold Edition
Author: Barry Schwartz, Esq. - BIA
… Most companies have a checklist in place for exiting employees, usually covering things like benefits, the status of projects, and the return of company property. While beneficial from an HR standpoint, these checklists don’t always consider the needs of the IT or Legal departments…
… Analyzing the employee’s personal devices to remove confidential data…
… Ask questions about future plans and employment to assess the likelihood of the employee walking away with company data. Remind employees about the detrimental effects on the company if data is taken and used elsewhere, e.g. the costs to remediate it from another company’s devices, the expense of an investigation or lawsuit, and the damage to the reputation of the employee and the new company…
It seems that my separation of service concerns are shared by BIA and their customers. Nice piece by Barry, though his checklist is behind their EmailWall. As a reminder, I published a free checklist without demanding your email or registration. It had not occurred to me that HR might not ask about future plans in the exit interview, so a good point to confirm. Handling employee BYOD phones and home computers used for remote work is tricky. Demanding access to image the device during/after exit interview is a worst-case scenario in my book. I prefer clients to look at how they can minimize corporate data on BYOD/home devices with secured work profiles, VPN access or VDI’s.