Any employer understands the fact that his employees will someday leave his company. Altogether with their physical departure, they also take important information out of the business.
All employees come in contact with information more or less important to the intellectual security of the company. Thus, when they move to another concurential business, the integrity of your own might be compromised.
How could you stop or minimize this phenomenon?
First of all, it is important to keep your employees within your company. The way they feel about their workplace is the key factor that makes them leave or stay.
If the working environment is not properly equipped, it does not have the necessary conditions for performing a productive professional activity, the atmosphere is stressful, pressing, and the management yells at the staff or humiliates them, be sure that any employee will not last long in the company, and will leave sooner or later, taking your secrets out of the business.
Moreover, the financial component is also quite motivating. A perfect working environment with a low salary might not be enough to keep an employee within your business. He may enjoy what he’s doing and even be good at it, but if he can’t pay his child’s school, you will not be able to keep him.
If the initiative of staff shifting does not come from the employee, it might come from the rival businesses. The so-called non-solicitation clause is a quite common method. Its essence lies in restricting the rights of the company (sometimes also its affiliates) in hiring employees of competitor companies. The restriction is set for a specific period (during the employment period and even for some time after the expiration of the contract).
It may happen that an employee, who has left a long time ago, now works in a rival company. He is still friends with someone who works for you. They talk to each other every day and the former employee tries to persuade the actual one to leave your business and go to the rival company. Can you stop him from doing that? In this situation, it might already be too late, but if you make all new employees sign an agreement of non-enticement, you would be able to protect your company from further similar incidents.
The prohibition of luring former colleagues and clients is stipulated in an agreement on non-enticement. The employee is obliged not to incite the employees of his former employer to leave the company and must not promote his new employment to a competitor’s actual workers. Often, the obligation also contains a ban on luring customers, partners and suppliers of the former employer, as well as inducing them to do business with the former employee or his new employer.
Remember that every company must think about how to preserve its employees, once it lets them inside its activity. All they learn can afterwards be used against you and for the benefit of your rivals. That’s why it is compulsory to formulate a strategy that will protect your firm’s intellectual property from being taken away and used by competitors!
