Product Habits - Layoff madness

Layoffs are in the headlines right now. A lot.

You don’t have to look hard to find tweets and social posts from employees who were let go in less than graceful ways.

Many people are disgruntled and unhappy with how everything went down. And it makes sense, layoffs are often unexpected and heartbreaking for the people who are affected.

Considering that in normal circumstances over 45% of employees admit to taking documents from former employers before they leave - it’s more important than ever to have your offboarding practices buttoned up.

Employees who are being let go suddenly or in non-traditional ways are more likely to take or expose company information. Either accidentally because they’re in a rush and didn’t have time to do the proper handoffs or intentionally because they are upset or disappointed.

Here are the top three tips that we recommend for anyone who is offboarding employees right now based on gaps we at Nira see in most offboarding processes. If you’re doing everything else right when it comes to offboarding, you’re probably still missing these:

1. Watch for mass deletions of documents

When people leave, sometimes they delete all of their documents because they think the company won’t need them anymore. But this can be a big, big mistake. Imagine this situation: a Manager who has been with the company for years is leaving and they delete everything in Google Drive or OneDrive on their last day. Suddenly, everyone’s work grinds to a halt because that manager owned essential shared drives and folders used by the entire team that they deleted - including all the documents within those drives and folders. The manager also inherited dozens of departing employee’s documents over the years as other people left and ownership was transferred. A few deleted folders can easily turn into hundreds of thousands of deleted documents and work gets massively disrupted.

2. Remove employee personal account access to company docs

Over half (52%) of people say they or a coworker have accidentally added their personal email to company documents. That’s a lot of personal accounts with access to company documents. And guess what doesn’t get shut down as part of most offboarding procedures? Personal account access from employees. It’s essential to not only scrub access from a departed employee’s company account, but their personal accounts, too.

3. Identify and retain company documents that are owned by employee’s personal accounts

The number of company documents that get accidentally created by employees on their personal accounts and then shared with other people at the company is staggering. It’s just so easy to pop open a new document while you’re working and not realize you’re in your personal account. With so many people leaving companies so rapidly, a lot of valuable company information is accidentally walking out the door because it’s owned by employee personal accounts. Those documents may end up being accessible by anyone on the internet, deleted, or subject to breaches because personal accounts are less likely to have 2FA turned on.

If you or your company is dealing with offboarding challenges right now, feel free to reach out directly to me or share this email with your IT or Security team.

At Nira, we’ve got a ton of experience with this stuff and we’re happy to give more advice to prevent unauthorized access to company information.

Hiten

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Product Habits - Layoff madness

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