Guarding Your Firm's Privacy While Your Folks Work at Home
A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill
Keeping Your Firm's Products Confidential When They're in the Hands of a Work at Home Employee
There are several key safety features and practices essential to protecting your company's intellectual and other property safe from theft and prying eyes when your employee works at home.
When Work at Home is Done for the Day - Lock it up!
The most obvious are locks. The ideal work at home candidates will be able to seclude themselves and their home office environments behind closed doors that lock when unattended. File cabinets need locks; their homes need alarms and locked doors and windows.
Protecting Work at Home Intellectual Property
The second form of security is password protection of the intellectual property that's held on your employees' work at home computer. You can also take further steps and apply monitoring software, some as invasive (though quite possibly offensive and counter productive) as keystroke monitoring. You can also purchase theft-avoidance devices such as Cyber Angel software that acts like a Lo Jack for computers.
Should someone steal a PC or laptop from your employee's home office you can lock down the information stored on it, delete it if necessary and the police can trace its whereabouts. There are also keyable locks that prevent your hardware and other equipment from being removed from the location of the employee's home office.
If You own it, You Can More Easily Retrieve it
Many firms, in an intent to save a few dollars up front, have made the mistake of allowing an employee to use his or her own PC for telework. Why is this a bad decision? Think about your own home PC use. Do you have a teenager who surfs the web, hangs out in chat rooms, downloads movies? Ever try to out-hack these born-to-electronics cyber whizzes? What can't they get into? Do you have a little one who likes to mimic mommy or daddy, play with stuff she shouldn't, break things he has no business touching?
And what if that employees quits, or worse yet, must be terminated? There is your intellectual property on their computer. Rather than driving to their home and picking up that PC and walking out you're left with the hope that your former, possibly disgruntled employee will return all work-related materials to you unaltered.
How do You Know Things are As They Should be?
The first step in installing a work at home employee is a home visit - or if not in the same locale, then pictures provided by the employee of the home office. You want to document that locks are in place, the home safe is ergonomically correct, and your equipment is safe from hazards such as frayed wires, ungrounded plugs, and prying unauthorized eyes.
Get it in writing - make sure your work-at-home employee has made a written dated commitment to follow your firm's guidelines for ergonomics, safety, and security. Make sure they are committed to regular computer security updates and have easy access to your IT staff in case of emergency. The more you clarify up front the safer your company's property will be.
