Be Careful How Much Data Your Employees Can Access

Gawker today has an account of why you shouldn't trust Facebook with your data. The post talks about how employees, equipped with too much access and loose internal controls on private data, have sometimes abused that data at the social media giant. One section of the post certainly resonated with me:

Sensitive data hoards inevitably attract attempts at unauthorized access. Whether it's hospital employees peaking at celebrity medical records or federal workers abusing their wiretap access 100 times in two tears (dubiously claiming it was an "accident"), people confronted with a pile of information feel compelled to start digging.

Sometimes it's important to trust employees with massive amounts of data but the key is to place strict controls over personal data and limit access to only select individuals with terms of use of that data. Facebook is lucky that this problem seems to be handled in house, but lax controls on employees like Facebook seems to employ leaves the company way to vulnerable for lawsuits should this information be abused in a way which harms the user. Tempting employees with unrestricted access leaves the company in this position.

Sarcastic Praise

In my company, we're currently undergoing our annual Personal Development Review process. Within this process, we review our accomplishments from the past year, receive praise and criticism from our managers, and have a chance to respond to the manager comments. As we go through this process, it reminds me of a report that the Onion News Network did on sarcastic praise copied below. Although The Onion report is a joke, sometimes praise given to employees can come off as sarcastic or unconvincing. Make sure you give praise only when deserved. If you feel like you're being sarcastic, maybe the praise is unwarranted.


Report: 70 Percent Of All Praise Sarcastic

How To Get Fired and How To Fire Someone Else

Two interesting articles for your Thursday:

-The first is from Career Solvers and gives a lesson on how to get fired. Although the author is talking about firing her phone company, many of these same principles apply to the workplace. They are:

1. Not showing up for work
2. Coming to work unprepared
3. Blaming others for the team's errors
4. Not communicating with others
5. Telling the boss (me) you couldn’t get a project done because it was understaffed.
6. Asking for a raise before you have proved your value. 

The post ends with this bit of advice on why to eliminate these practices from your repotoire:

According to CareerBuilder’s 2010 Jobs Forecast a trend for 2010 may very well be replacing lower performing employees and taking advantage of the large percentage of top talent in the labor force to strengthen their work force. Because in this economy, employers have choices…and there are plenty of job seekers out there that would love to be employed by them.

-On the flip side, Easy Small Business HR has Do's and Don'ts (or is it "don't's"?) when firing employees. Some of those:

Don't: 

• Leave the task to someone who does not have direct supervision of the worker being fired.
  
• Fire an employee on the spot unless the actions are so egregious that it requires immediate removal from the workplace.

Do:

• Fire workers who have crossed the line of what is considered egregious inappropriate behavior if you are absolutely certain based on the facts that the employee is guilty of misconduct.
• Respect the privacy and confidentiality of everyone involved by meeting with your employee(s) in a private area
• Tell your employee the reason for the termination.

Some good advice from those two sources...though you should only be following the latter!