You love your company, and your coworkers do too for the most part. But you know that guy, the one who always hanging out by himself at the holiday party? He’s not standing there because he wants to be alone. He’s standing there because he’s a complainer. And no matter what the poor soul who gets tricked into talking with him says, he can’t see anything positive about this company.
What if this one person decides that he wants to make a statement when he eventually leaves the company? Could your intellectual property be stolen by a disgruntled employee and used by competitors? Will everything you and your colleagues have worked on this year—the accomplishments you’re celebrating at the holiday party—be lost?
How Much Can One Person Cost a Company?
A recent study by Symantec shows that half of all employees take corporate data with them when they leave a company. On top of that, around 40 percent said that they plan to use that data in their new job. So the biggest threat to your data, your intellectual property, might not be a natural disaster but an employee.
According to an article on Forbes.com, disgruntled employees are generally a very small percentage of a company’s employees—around 6 percent in the study mentioned. However, they can cause extremely costly problems. The article states that disgruntled employees are more likely to cause “irreversible damage to your brand” and to “[l]eak important company information.” It also states that disgruntled employees are more likely to steal from the company.
How Do You Keep Information Safe?
The best way to keep your intellectual property safe is to store it where your employee cannot get to it and to make sure you have copies off-site if it is deleted or physically damaged. The answer is cloud storage and backup, and luckily there are companies, including Echopath, that will organize and encrypt your corporate data. This makes the data secure and easy to find when you need it.
It also means that one guy with a bone to pick and a flash drive can’t steal important business plans or client lists from his desk. And if your company’s disgruntled employee is not the calculating type, but the smash-stuff-up or format-everyone’s-hard-drives type, you can be sure that your data will be safe out of his reach.