Eventually, an employee will leave your organization due to many possibilities including retirement, transfer, or termination, however, employee departure could be a large risk to your business.
Employee departure can leave the door open to hackers and fraud, therefore, you should have a plan in place to deal with employee departures. This may require multiple departments including Human Resources, IT department, and their department manager.
With employee departure, there may be many openings or holes in your network such as unused accounts or passwords. These can be used by hackers or even departed employees to access your business data including finances, and personal information.
Passwords are dangerous as there are many of them outside the network such as your website or social media that can damage your business reputation by posting fake information on the websites and social media accounts.
The good news is most of these cyber threats can be avoided entirely by planning ahead with your management team. It is very important to track everything the employee has access to including online, internal network and any software-as-a-service (SAAS) you may use.
When there is an employee departure in your organization, you should take the following actions:
- Change all passwords used by the employee.
- Remove permissions to external and internal networks.
- Delete account/page administrator status for employees with access to company social media including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram.
- Find out if the employee had access to any other employee’s passwords. If so, change them also.
If an employee is laid off or fired, industry best practice is to prevent them from accessing business computers and collect all company property such as laptops, keys, and access badges immediately.
The Canadian Payroll Association (CPA) has been representing employers’ payroll interests since 1978 and they offer a sample of a Sample Termination Checklist.
Always remember to warn your IT department or managed IT services provider to ensure you are covered. You should always keep your IT department up-to-date so they can run the checklist on offboarding an employee as well as be alert to suspicious activity.
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