Technology Tips for Firing Employees

The firing of an employee is never an easy task, but it is a necessary one at times. When letting someone go, it is important to take the proper steps to ensure a smooth and seamless transition for both the company and the employee. Hiring and firing employees can be difficult, but there are some tips you can use to minimize the risks and costs of wrongful termination. This article will discuss what to include in exit procedures and how to protect your company’s data. Proper exit procedures are essential for your company’s safety and the security of your sensitive information. ACIS® IT Solutions is not a human resources department, nor do we play one on the Internet. The following suggestions are not legal advice. Our primary concern in this blog post is the termination process’s technical (IT) side rather than the legal or HR department aspects.

What Are Some Costs of a Fired Employee?

The costs associated with replacing a fired employee can be staggering. Depending on the person’s age and pay grade, it may cost as much as 16% of the employee’s annual salary to replace them. Additional costs associated with hiring a replacement employee include time spent training them and losing productivity during the transition period. These costs can make firing an employee a disastrous decision for any business.

Another cost associated with firing an employee is the loss of social capital. Social capital is the relationships people build with others at work which contribute to the company’s productivity. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, a loss of an employee’s social capital costs a company more than one-third of that individual’s annual salary. According to the Center for American Progress, replacing a worker costs about one-fifth of the employee’s salary.

If an employee has shown signs of bad behavior, there are many steps that an employer must follow before firing the employee. There are legal issues to consider, as well as employee morale concerns. Even when terminating an employee for misconduct, it may take the organization a year to regain productivity. The cost of retraining an employee can be up to 20% of the employee’s salary.

Protect Against Data Loss

Disgruntled employees can be a great source of data loss. They may feel they were not given enough opportunities and may be motivated by greed. They may even want to steal intellectual property or delete data. When this happens, it can cost your company significant money. Luckily, there are ways to protect against this threat.

Whenever you’re firing an employee, be sure to proactively protect against data loss by removing access to your company’s systems. Employees should be given plenty of notice to prepare for their departure. Failing to disable access to company systems can allow a fired employee to gain access to internal systems and information, which will cause a data leak.

The FBI has been trying to warn business owners about this problem, as disgruntled employees can cause havoc with a company’s data infrastructure. One example involves an employee at EnerVest, who reset the company’s servers to factory default settings and disconnected remote backups, costing the company $1 million in lost productivity and related costs. Another example is when employees leave a company and take sensitive data with them. The sensitive company data could include personal data about customers, source code for software developers, and creative project renders for designers. Even contact information for salespeople can be exposed.

Here Are the Tech Tips for Firing Employees

Disable Computer Access

When it comes to firing employees, one of the most challenging tasks is to ensure that your employees are not still using the company’s technology.

Remove the Terminated Employee From Accounts and Access to IT Resources

As soon as an employee is terminated, you should remove their access to all accounts and IT resources, including email, social media, file-sharing, and cloud-based services. Please also consider changing the passwords to these accounts.

Uninstall Software Installed by the Terminated Employee

If you find that the terminated employee installed any software on company computers, you should uninstall it immediately. Uninstalling the software will help prevent malicious software from being installed on your company’s computers.

Look at the Terminated Employee’s Local PC/Workstation To See if Any Applicable Information Needs To Be Removed and Archived

It would be best if you also looked at the terminated employee’s local PC or workstation when firing an employee. You might find that sensitive data needs to be removed and archived.

Remove the Employee From Access Control Lists

If the terminated employee has access to sensitive data, you should remove them from the access control lists. Removing access will help prevent the employee from accessing this data.

Audit Logs To Monitor for Suspicious Activity

You should monitor your company’s audit logs for suspicious activity. Auditing the logs will help you detect if the terminated employee is trying to access company systems or data.

Disable Cloud Account Access

If you’re looking to fire an employee, one way to make this process easier is to disable the cloud account access of the person who left the company. Most cloud platforms charge per user, and a non-updated account means a breach risk. You can also ask employees to change their passwords, remove aliases, and change their Active Directory accounts.

Fortunately, this should not be difficult to implement and can often be done for free. For instance, a simple blacklist can prevent cloud access from Google Drive, Dropbox, and Apple Cloud. Most startups don’t have the budget to create their own data centers, so they often turn to Amazon AWS. You can even add a suitable error message.

It is crucial to remove the personal data of terminated employees. In some cases, you might want to take more extreme measures, such as remotely wiping all company devices to which the employee had access. Change shared passwords and usernames and create dedicated ones for those who still need to log in to the company’s systems. If the employee’s cloud account was set up with a company Dropbox account, revoke that account’s access and any similar platforms. And finally, remove any association files that the employee may have saved on their personal cloud storage accounts.