Question: There’s some business secrets that I’d rather not have my employees know, but because they’re involved in some of the processes, they have to have knowledge of them. What can I do to make sure that my secrets aren’t leaked to my competitors?
Answer: We all have valuable business secrets that we wouldn’t want in the hands of rivals. Our employees often know those secrets too – and that’s no problem while their loyalties stay with us. But if an employee leaves acrimoniously, or is poached by a competitor, then you are definitely exposed.
Confidentiality agreements will help protect your business secrets and they’re certainly a much better alternative than the courtroom.
There are many instances where an employer loses some of its information and the courts have to decide whether that information was confidential when it has been used by an employee after leaving the business.
The law states that employees can’t misuse your confidential information once they leave your business. The difficulty is always in ascertaining what that confidential information is.
Protect your business
Confidentiality agreements are an effective way to protect your business information. Confidentiality is an issue that you should address initially in a contract of employment.
The confidential information should be identified quite clearly in that contract of employment. If that’s not possible, then at the next possible time, any of your confidential information should be clearly identified to an employee and, to the fullest extent possible, the employee should acknowledge in writing that they understand that your information is confidential.
Words help, writing’s best
Although a verbal agreement is not at all ideal, it is effective in as much as it communicates the issue of confidentiality to an employee and shows an attempt by the employer to reach an agreement on the issue.
The best way of course is to publish a document either for the employee specifically, or a general policy document for your business, identifying information that is confidential to the business. This will help to ensure that there is no ambiguity down the track as to what the employee knows.
By Peter Switzer, published on 17/11/2008
COMMENTS
deslog
24/12/09 01:01:43
What if an employee signs a confidentually agreement then throughout thier employment contributes great ideas or systems that help the company advance in productivity and then they decide to leave and give these same ideas to the next company they work for even though they have been fully implemented into the first companys workflow, do these ideas and systems then become the property of the first company that they signed an agreement with?
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