information sources Archives

Are you wondering if you should do more to protect your trade secrets and confidential information?

Even if you don't think the answer is 'yes' for your organization, it probably should be.

According to a recent survey conducted by Symantec, 50% of employees who left their job in the last 12 months, by choice or by force, left with confidential information; 40% of those people plan to use the information in their next job.

You read that right: one out of every two employees that left their job took important data with them.

How can this be? Is the world really that dishonest that this many people just willy-nilly steal, admit to that theft in surveys, and go on their blissful way without a care in the world?

Doubtful.

On Why A Thief Might Become a Thief...

Have you ever seen the one where Ross teaches Chandler how to "find the line between stealing and taking what the hotel owes you"? (I am, of course, talking about an episode of Friends).

In recap, it is not cool to take salt and pepper shakers; it is allowable (but still not "cool" by Chandler's standards) to take the salt and pepper. (Also, please note that the title of this post has just become completely relevant.)

Discussing the Symantec survey results, the Ohio Employer Law Blog pointed out that not only do half of exiting employees take information on the way out, but 62% said that taking the information was not wrong; 56% said it was not a crime; and 44% believe that software developers (which was the example given to respondents in the survey) have at least a partial ownership in their creations.

When most employees "steal" your information, they do not think of it as theft in the same manner that you do. For them, the information/customer list/trade secret they discreetly sneak out the door with them on their last day of work is just like that salt and pepper: simply their attempt to take what the hotel (i.e., you) owes them.

After all, they reason, wasn't it their hard work, time, genius, dedication, and who knows what else that created this confidential information in the first place?

What Can You Do?

A lot.

Protecting confidential information should start with the recruiting and hiring process and go on until way after the employment relationship ends.

Here's how to ensure that data protection issues are front and center at all stages of the employment relationship (and beyond):

• Discuss invention ownerships, intellectual property rights, and the use of confidential information in the initial job offer. Before the employee even accepts the job, make sure they know what it entails.
• Have NDAs/Nonsolicitation Agreements/Restrictive Covenants in the original employment contract. There are a lot of laws regarding how these documents are handled, but, following all of your state laws, have and enforce these!
• Keep Confidential Information Confidential. Some common sense advice: the fewer people who know something, the less likely it is that that something will become common knowledge.
• Train and Educate. Employees don't know it is wrong to take certain information? Tell them! Show them what qualifies as protected information, how they should use it, and, more importantly, how not to use it.
• Discuss in Exit Interviews. When an employee is leaving, have a conversation with them about what data belongs to the employer. Remind the employee of the employee contract. Make sure they know what is expected of them and that you do mean to enforce the contract.

Maybe the most important thing you can do to protect your confidential information is to enforce your agreements. If you have reason to suspect an employee is inappropriately using your information, check up on this and enforce the contract. This will curtail any damage already caused by the misuse, but it also shows current employees that you are serious.

One last statistic from that scary survey: 51% of employees believe it is okay to take protected information because the employer doesn't enforce policies. Enforce those policies people, and protect yourself from current and future data theft.

It's hard to believe, but day two was even better than day one here at the HR Technology Conference.

After having a nice continental breakfast, I headed off to 'Bringing HR Into The Cloud -Naomi's Master Panel', where leading expert Naomi Lee Bloom moderated a panel of leading industry executives primarily responsible for making the decisions that will determine the future of HR in The Cloud. The star studded cast included:

• Mike Capone, CIO, ADP;
• Steven Miranda, SVP, Applications Development, Oracle;
• Sanjay Poonen, President Global Solutions, SAP;
• Adam Rogers, CTO, Ultimate Software;
• Stan Swete, CTO, Workday; and
• John Wookey, EVP, Social Applications, Salesforce.com

After that, I took some time to find out what was happening in the world of employee benefits. After all, I do edit the Employee Benefits section for XpertHR, so how could I possible pass up hearing how some of the top HR leaders of our time feel about what's happening in the wonderful world of employee benefits.

Benefits in a Time of Uncertainty -A CHRO Panel was moderated by Mark Stelzner, Principal/Founder, Inflexion Advisors. Interesting perspectives ranging from how to use employee benefits to engage employees, to how and what types of benefits they offer to their own employees (remember, these are the folks that provide benefits consulting and outsourcing services, so it was pretty interesting to hear their perspectives on how they manage their own employee benefit solutions.

Of course, each of these individuals also had something to say about the changing world of employee benefits, particularly in light of an increasingly complex regulatory environment and an increase in consumer driven health plans. Kudos to the following for taking the time to share their insights with us:

• Artell Smith, CHRO, Aon Hewitt;
• Brian Johnson, EVP, HR, Fidelity Investments;
• Norbert Englert, CHRO, Mercer
• Gail McKee, CHRO, Towers Watson; and
• Tom Maddison, Corporate SVP and CHRO, Xerox Corporation

After a quick lunch it was time to tour the Expo Hall. If you don't have a specific plan in mind, navigating among the vendors can be quite a challenge.  My colleague Michael Carty did a tremendous job covering the swags. He also did a yeoman's job covering the entire social buzz around the conference.

Thanks for the tremendous effort you put toward this Michael!

If you asked me 25 years ago (when I was a newbie in HR) if I would be attending an HR Technology Conference my immediate response would have been an emphatic NO! After all, HR is HR, not IT right?

Times have changed over the past 25 years and HR now partners with IT to ensure the effective use and management of technology. As far as I'm concerned, there is no better way to ensure technological expertise then by attending the HR Technology Conference. The conference also provides an amazing opportunity to get information about the latest technology trends affecting HR.

HR is at a pivotal crossroads when it comes to using technology as a means to bring about change in the organization. Major themes from this year's conference include mobile technology, workplace analytics, cloud computing and of course, social in the enterprise. As I mentioned in my pre-conference article deciding what sessions to attend was a tough decision. Here's how my first day went.

Co-chair Bill Kutik gave a warm welcome before passing the baton to opening keynote speaker Tom Koulopoulos. At this standing room only event one of the most important takeaways for HR is that although technology is important, even more important is how you manage your human capital.

Next, Brian Kelly, Global Commercial Leader, Metrics and Analytics at Mercer provided some practical advice on how to get off to a good start in his session "Relieve the Guilt! A Starter's Guide to Workforce Analytics". Let's face it....like it or not, workforce analytics is here to stay. A couple of excellent points:

• Determine what is important for your organization to focus on.
• Don't wait for your data to be clean (it never will be), otherwise you will never start.

Next came an interesting twist for HR recruiters. The Candidate Experience Awards (the CandEs) recognizes the best companies to apply to work for. Since many people share both their positive and negative candidate experiences, the winners of the CandEs can serve as an outstanding role model as to how to make sure your candidates don't fall into the 'black hole'. Check out our Recruiting section for practical tips as to how XpertHR can help as well.

Kudos to Gerry Crispin, Elaine Orler and Ed Newman for recognizing the need to raise the candidate experience level and, of course, congratulations to all of the winners. The list can be found here.

At the Top Products of 2012 Awards Luncheon, Human Resource Executive magazine recognized 10 companies for excellence and innovation. The winners include:

• Ascendify for Enterprise Talent Community;
• Employment Technologies Corp. for getEASyView.com;
• HireVue Inc. for HireVue Mobile App;
• Monster Worldwide for SeeMore;
• Peoplefluent for Fluency on the Move - Suite of Mobile Talent Applications;
• Qualtrics for Qualtrics 360;
• Scavado for Scavado;
• Scout OnDemand for Coaching Management System;
• StartWire for ApplicationConnect; and
• Visier Inc. for Visier Workforce Analytics.

The luncheon was capped off by an amazing performance by Mike Rayburn one of the most talented and innovative and entertaining presenters it has been my pleasure to hear.

More fun to come....be sure to stay tuned for some more great insights from #hrtechconf!

About a year ago, XpertHR decided to increase the amount of coverage it was giving to employment tribunals, with regular reports on interesting employment tribunal decisions. We've now taken the next step with the launch of our new Tribunal Watch blog, which is dedicated to highlighting developments in the employment tribunals.

If you've not yet lent it an ear, XpertHR's Weekly podcast provides an excellent, thoroughly enjoyable and completely free weekly digest of key HR and employment issues. The current edition includes an introduction to the newly launched XpertHR benchmarking service from my colleague David Shepherd, explaining how it works and what XpertHR subscribers can get out of it.

The implications for the workplace of social networking technologies and how people interact with them look set to rise in importance as touchstone issues for HR over the coming decade. And reading, commenting on, or even writing your own HR blogs can represent one of the most direct and accessible routes into social networking for HR professionals and employment practitioners. We're currently running a brief online survey of HR blogs and blogging habits (external website), and we'd greatly appreciate your views. It's entirely free to take part, and should take up no more than 30 seconds of your time. The results will be published here on Employment Intelligence in the coming weeks.

I'm delighted to announce that XpertHR's new benchmarking service (subscription required) has been launched today (Thursday 14 January 2010). This is a major enhancement to XpertHR, providing our subscribers with the opportunity to access a huge resource of customisable HR benchmarking data. The interactive features of XpertHR benchmarking enable you to tailor your own bespoke HR benchmarking data. We think it'll quickly prove to be an invaluable tool for our users.

Strictly speaking this is 14 floors above the XpertHR editorial offices. The picture shows south west London still in the grip of snow and with the threat of more to come as the weather continues to cause high levels of employee absence.

With the busiest months of the pay setting calendar now upon us, employers can turn to some bang up-to-date salary data from CELRE, published exclusively on XpertHR Job Pricing, to inform their decisions.

Annual reports published in the final few weeks of 2009 as part of CELRE's core business survey cover staff working in HR and personnel, finance and accounts, and sales and marketing roles.

There is also fresh data for engineers and technicians, and for the distribution and media industries.

The trial of a new occupational health advice line for employers is launched today in seven pilot areas in England, and in the whole of Wales and Scotland. The service (called Health for Work in England, Healthy Working Lives in Scotland and Healthy Working Wales in Wales) is part of the Government's plan to reform support services for people with mental health conditions, aimed at helping people remain in work, or get back into work if they are unemployed.

With both main political parties now wedded to the idea of public sector pay freezes and major private sector employers such as British Airways weighing in with similar initiatives of their own, reward specialists may wonder how they are going to fill their days.

Many HR professionals’ remit extends beyond the UK to other European countries. This demands that they are familiar with employment laws and developments in countries across Europe.

XpertHR covers employment law across Europe, with information on national employment law in European countries, covering issues such as the law on Sunday working, hours of work, holiday and maternity leave, and trade union recognition rights.

XpertHR JobPricing has won a double dose of recognition in prestigious industry awards.

The service, which allows subscribers to access the CELRE salary survey database and create tables and charts based on their own criteria, has been shortlisted twice in the 2009 Data Publishers Association awards.

From next week a UK directory will be connecting customers to mobile phone users in the UK, something that may well prove to be occasionally useful, and occasionally irritating.

The Information Commissioner was poised to order the release of the full details of MPs' expenses, including receipts, three years ago but reportedly changed his mind after pressure was exerted by the House of Commons. Read more on the Telegraph website.

This blog is now approaching its second birthday, during which time the number of visitors has steadily built up while those of us working at XpertHR have gradually incorporated blog posting into our daily routines.

Since we track traffic using Google Analytics, I thought you might be interested to see some statistics about how the site is used. (Don't worry, Google Analytics doesn't allow us to know who our individual visitors are or which pages they visit.)

It’s always good to get out to a conference, sit in a room of HR professionals and hear exactly what’s concerning them - and yesterday’s IRS discipline and grievance masterclass at the Cumberland Hotel in London was no exception.

You wait forever for the employment tribunal statistics - and then two sets come along at once. Well, not exactly, as the figures for April 2008 to February 2009 provided to XpertHR by the Tribunals Service today are only provisional, and therefore subject to change. They do, however, give an indication of what the final figures are likely to look like.

Well, the bad news is that the Employment Tribunals Service has decided against the disclosure of the 2007/08 employment tribunals statistics, which we requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

It looks like Freedom of Information Requests are the way forward for employment tribunal statistics, with Eversheds apparently requesting (and receiving) recent age discrimination figures (see story on FT.com).

If you are online and reading this, the chances are you aren't one of those people who regards the whole interwebby thing as a passing fad akin to CB radio.

Quite possibly, you've even read a few reports recently about Twitter - and wondered whether this is perhaps one futile tech development too far. But stay with it, and you may even discover a useful application for it in your own working life.

Almost half way through February 2009 and still no sign of the employment tribunal statistics for the period from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008. With an increasing number of XpertHR subscribers demanding to know why the figures on our site are so out of date (we can only pass on what we’re given), we’ve been left with no choice but to submit a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Justice asking them to reveal last year’s figures.

If you’re suffering from micro-boredom at any point this week, take a minute to acquaint yourself with the words and phrases destined to become part of your working life in 2009.

Do you know how many disability discrimination claims were brought in 2007/08? Or the average age discrimination award in that period? How about the number of unfair dismissal cases where more than £50,000 compensation was awarded?

Some new additions have been made to XpertHR's employment glossary, which provides clear explanations of over 450 legal and employment-related words, phrases and abbreviations.

XpertHR was named business website of the year 2008 last night at the Association of Online Publishers awards - the online publishing industry oscars.

I've just published the second XpertHR screencast. This one shows how to use XpertHR's content icons to find items of interest quickly and easily.

Some new additions have been made to XpertHR's employment glossary, which provides clear explanations of over 450 legal and employment-related words, phrases and abbreviations.

CELRE is currently recruiting new participants for the 2008 Distribution Salary Survey. If your company is a player in the industry and would like to benchmark salaries at all levels from forklift truck driver to warehouse manager, we would like to hear from you.

The best bit about it is that new participants this year will get the full report free of charge.

I spent this morning recording and publishing the first XpertHR screencast - a demonstration of the optional "idea cloud" enhancement for our search results page.

This will be the first of several video guides on aspects of the service that will be published over the next few weeks.

If you are reading this blog using Internet Explorer you are in good company. According to our web analytics system, some 91% of readers of this blog and the main XpertHR web site over the past month accessed the services using IE - as illustrated in the graph above, which you can click to see a full version.

The techies here at XpertHR Towers will be getting their heavy-duty hammers and monkey-wrenches out at the weekend to do a spot of essential blog maintenance.

A story on The Scotsman's website today has prompted me to introduce an award for most misguided employment-related news story.

Our inaugural Golden P45 Award goes to a report on Edinburgh City Council's efforts to address equal pay issues among its workforce which informs us that

"Workers have been denied extra payments offered to their female colleagues because sex discrimination laws do not apply to men."

Admittedly, I'm no expert in Scottish law. Maybe their unfair dismissal laws don't apply to those who have been sacked either.

James Purnell is to return to the Department for Work and Pensions as secretary of state following Peter Hain's resignation from the Cabinet this afternoon.

Purnell was previously pensions minister, before moving on last summer to become culture secretary. In his previous incarnation at the DWP, Purnell distinguished himself by writing a regular pensions reform blog.

XpertHR's parent company, Reed Business Information, was named online business publisher of the year last night by the Association of Online Publishers.

XpertHR itself was also shortlisted in a further two categories: as business editorial team of the year, and as business website of the year. Sister site Personneltoday.com joined XpertHR on the business website shortlist.

Confused about the distinction between ordinary and additional maternity leave? Not sure what the difference is between a case management discussion and a review hearing? Come across a Latin phrase? Help is at hand.

If you miss the days when BBC Television cleared its schedules to offer wall-to-wall coverage of the Trades Union Congress, then the TUC has a little treat for you.

If you're lucky enough to receive an IRS email bulletin you may have noticed a new addition to the options on the right-hand side of the page. Sharing benchmarking data is nothing new to IRS - take a look at any of the 15 pieces of research that we've already completed this year. What is new is the ability to see what surveys we're currently running.

The end of August is almost upon us, and with it comes an end to the traditional newspaper silly season - though sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

Your friends you choose; your family you're born with. But the people you work alongside for eight hours a day are chosen by a team of middle managers. It's no wonder the office is such a war zone.

My Personnel Today colleague Natalie Cooper is launching The Work Clinic, a blog dedicated to workplace counsel and career advice, today - and it kicks off with the results of a confidential survey of people's top office irritations.

More than 7 million people worked in production industries in 1907; a century later that has fallen to just 3 million. But after 100 years of industrial rise and fall, there is a great deal about work and industry in the Edwardian era which is familiar today.

The publication of this year's Annual Business Inquiry has given the Office for National Statistics a good excuse to draw attention to it, by highlighting some interesting findings from the first Census of Production (PDF format, 76KB), published a century ago.

Here's a video from the common craft show explaining RSS feeds for beginners.

Click To Play

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Feed frenzy

Office life is a rich source of inspiration for cartoonists, and Dilbert is without doubt the uber-cartoon of the genre. Tormented and exploited by his heartless boss, Dilbert is an everyman for our times.

But do you see anything of yourself in Catbert, the evil HR manager and possibly the world's most famous fictional human resource practitioner (albeit in cat form)? Apparently, American HR people do.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams, who draws from experience of office life, having both an MBA and 16 years' corporate employment under his belt, was guest speaker at a recent Society for Human Resource Management conference in Orlando, Florida. Apparently he had them rolling in the aisles.

Looks to me as though the speech lost a little in the translation, but perhaps Adams' own blog will do it for you.

XpertHR is now offering a range of feeds across a number of employment-related topics, including employment law, HR strategy and practice, pay and benefits, recuitment, and training and development. In most cases, you get the titles and summaries for free while the main content requires a subscription. But the employment law FAQs feed is free to all.

Also, why not subscribe to this blog's feed and my shared items feed on Google Reader while you're about it?