It is estimated that 80% of employees steal from their company, whether it is time, money and/or intellectual property. An unhappy, problem employee can do massive damage to a business. Crimes from discontented employees are on the rise and every day more and more sensitive data is in electronic documents that can copied and distributed easily.
Disgruntled employees have been known to do many damaging things such as:
– Talk badly about your company to others
– Use Social Media to exploit/smear your brand
– Ignore their job functions while they are copying company secrets, formulas, recipes, manuals
– Reveal corporate strategies to your competitors
– Snap screen-captured photos of diagrams
– Copy critical business documents
All these behaviors can do irreversible damage to your brand.
A discontented employee can mask or hide their frustrations while plotting their exit. They can send confidential documents to themselves via email. They can print manuals, copy client lists, screen-capture competitive product designs, or physically take product price lists. Many of these actions are performed over time which does not give you a clear picture of the extent of the damage until it is too late.
Whether actions are done purposely with intent to harm or not, it seems that company intellectual documents frequently “grow legs”, and ultimately, land in the wrong hands.
Disgruntled employees are on the rise with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many companies to furlough or even let employees go, causing career-crises and sometimes making those affected feel justified in taking actions to potentially cause major damage to your brand. This is one more situation that is causing more and more theft from that one-time trusted employee.
All organizations, big and small, need to have a security strategy in place to protect them from these threats. A good security practice will have many layers of security in place; network, data, endpoint, etc., but many plans overlook the protection of corporate documents.
Although the disgruntled employee will most definitely partake in document theft, everyone in your organization can potentially copy a document, send it via email, print it and even screen capture it, if they really want to, unless you put a document security system in place. Our Preferred Partner, Doc Solutions has a proven document security system, Doc-Secure, available to our members at a discount. Find them on FANO.org under Savings.
