Question about an employee
 

Our sales person has been on the verge of being fired for several months. Last Friday she came in and resigned. We took her company phone immediately, but she left the company computer at home. So we followed her home to get it. She obviously had planned this out, because every one of her business emails has been deleted. She used Outlook, and there is nothing in the deleted mail folder.
She was in sales, so her communications with clients is essential to us being able to move forward as seamlessly as possible. We don't know whom she has contacted to what she may have promised them.
We still owe her a paycheck, and I'm considering holding it until she produces the emails. Obviously this will require a visit with our attorney, but I'm just wondering if anyone has any experience with anything like this.

Yea, not so much. That being said you may be able to get them off the server (highly likely really).

I don't know for sure, but I think the business emails belong to the business. You will want an attorney there for your next meeting with this person, or would be well advised to.

All the business emails belong to the business. You can read them off the C drive if you bring them to a forensic expert. You can (and probably should) immediately get a restraining order against her to prevent her from using the company data she clearly kept and to keep her from contacting company customers. I'd do it right now, before the end of the week. You know she's home calling each one of her old customers and every other contact she ever heard of in your company.

However, you cannot withhold that last paycheck, even if she's stolen from you and owes you money. You have to give her the paycheck timely and sue her for damages later.

Tobra is correct. Those emails are property in the same context as the physical hardware.

Was she using a VPN network for email server access or was her computer completely isolated? If through a company held server then the emails should still be there even if she deleted them. Deleting them in that manner just frees up "local" disc space for her email account. If your IT person has set up your network properly that is.

At any rate, those emails belong to the company and the return of that company owned material I believe can be a requirement to settle final compensation.

If the e-mails were sent over the companies E-mail server, your IT group should be able to recover them.

Outlook uses a .pst file to store mail.

It's one file that acts kind of like a database.

Other mail clients are flat file, each email represented by an individual file.

The nature of the pst makes recovery much more difficult.

Who / how is your email handled. Where / what is your email server?

Your best / easiest shot will likely be at the server level.

This is the same employee you were having trouble with not too long ago?

Not much help now but for future reference you can always set up an alias or blind forward for an employees mail so you get a copy of it, for inbound at least.

OK, forget what I said..:D

Did she sign a non-compete and non-disclosure? These should be common practice for any sales role and are fully enforceable anywhere but California.

Have similar situation but after I threatened to sue him, he react and give me files which I need for business.

And someone told you - if your email are on some server of your website, your hosting provider should be able to recover all data, including mails.

Laws vary by state but in Calif. you must give the final paycheck in a timely manner. Even if they stole all your trade secrets and sold them to the Chinese. Emails are company property and may require a lawyer to get them unless they are on your server.

I would be on the phone right now to all the clients she handled and tell them about the great new free services you are offering as a long time customer. You are in a race to protect your relationships because she will likely burn them.

Every state has a rule as to how many days may pass before you pay her. Most are no more than 14 days and you do have to pay her.

I have a forensic computer expert who will be able to tell you what color her fingernail polish was when she deleted the emails and what perfume she used when she sent them originally. PM me and I'll send you the contact information.

The emails and ALL information she gained working for you are company assets.

If she is going to work for a competitor you can sue her and them for violating trade secrets. If you threaten that they will drop her and you won't have to actually sue.

This was well planned out. She's been in contact with your clients already. Think about what you would do if you were in her position and wanted to achieve maximum damage against your company. That's what she's been doing and what she's doing right now. You better get to your lawyer tomorrow morning.

Your IT person does make a full backup of your emails - which are configured for IMAP access only - every night right?

cant u get the mail off the server?

you could have been monitoring company emails all this time too and she would have never known-
until you fired her for planning this little operation she is in the midst of-

You are in a legal loose-loose situation, there are precedents on both sides of the fence regarding who owns what, privacy, etc...

Recover her mailbox from a week ago, restore, change her password in AD and access the email from another computer. If you find anything bad talk to a lawyer and I hope she signed a lot of employee contracts

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is this your IT guy?

Moving forward, invest in some CRM software. Hire salespeople that know how to use it.

this.

you should have up to the minute knowledge of all your sales reps pipelines in Salesforce or if you have in house talent, Netsuite.


you will never have to worry about whether your sales reps will leave or if they are doing activities to provide revenue for the company.

Also, use a hosted Exchange service. They are pretty cost effective for companies with less than 150 employees in my experience.

I had no problem exporting all the info I needed from Salesforce before I left my last job. While you can make it hard to sabotage data, you can't stop someone from pulling a report, exporting it to an Excel sheet and then emailing it to their Gmail account or copying it onto a thumb drive. Unfortunately for me, Salesforce didn't pull billing info from Oracle until a week after the end of the month, so I couldn't grab that info before I left to make sure they weren't shorting me on my last commission check, which I'm pretty sure they did.

Thank you for all the input. After thinking about it over night I've decided not to delay paying her and to bring in an IT guy to see what can be done about the emails. The job she moved on to is a huge step back - retail sales in a different industry, so I'm not worried about competition. As I think I posted before, her situation is exactly like that of a previous employee, right down to this.
They are both big girls - 300-400 pounds - really hard working and effective employees, but no love life. They both got men and they let their professional lives go. The first one took a retail job and married a really good looking guy whose OCD is so bad he can hardly function. (I had him do some work for me and his behavior was unbelievable). It lasted a year. This one is marrying a guy who looks like - well, if Tyrion on Game of Thrones was a couple of inches taller and a good bit rounder they could be brothers. The thought of that little guy crawling on top of this huge woman is both hilarious and disturbing. Oh well, they have their lives.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1397646975.jpg

Yep, my guess well. Get the attorney involved.

Has she truly "burned the bridge" down? Might it be cheaper to simply "bribe" her for the emails and cheaper too? I know it would "rub me wrong", but it might simply be the better decision for your business considering. Just throwing the idea out there...

ps: I've worked in an industry where "paying someone to go away amicably" is simply factored into the cost of doing business...(emotions removed), easier said than done, but sometimes...

Your post above says much about you as a leader. Certainly not something that should be available to all on the web. Common sense?

Look at yourself in this matter and decide if this is worth pursuing. I would cut it clean and move on. The business will survive.

Consider some serious introspection.

I dunno if you post was directed towards me :confused:. I've worked for major corporations where a single IT guy could quite easily cripple them and absolutely bring them to a complete halt for a LONG time. There is a reason nice, lucrative "severance packages" are handed out when whole depts. are outsourced (for example). It's strictly a bu$ine$$ decision by the powers that be who make tens of millions each year to handle such things imo.

ps: Not to mention "out of court" settlements....strictly a quantitative analysis and doing what's more cost effective.

pps: I am NOT a leader...not much of a follower either :D

I think he must be responding to you, since in my post I said I decided to "cut it clean."

There is something to be said for a nice, fat, optional "end of employment" carrot to encourage good behavior on the way out the door. It would have to be included in the employment contract though.

I'd hand her her check, and mention it's too bad she quit and burner her bridges, as she was being considered for a company car and a raise......

Then meet her new boss for a drink, and warn him about the deleted emails.

I read it as the description surrounding the physical appearance of the two former employees, their personal relations, and commentary on the possibly disturbing nature of their coupling.

While amusing it is somewhat inappropriate.

As a former IT professional, we never worked with employment contracts, nor did anyone that wasn't at an executive level. The "carrot" is an effective tool...don't know what it's worth to your business, but I'd bet a relatively small carrot would be better for your bottom line than paying attorneys and IT professionals to mitigate your "loss". None of the severance packages I've seen handed out by these huge corporations were ever contractual...just smart business decisions. Good luck!

This^^^. The OP (wd15) appears to be showing colors that may be evident to this and other employees.

Two sides to every story.

Why was she so dissatisfied working there? Start with that unless you want to be having the same problem a year from now.

I have no legal background (but I did stay in a Holiday Inn recently) but I digress.
Although my emotion says get even by withholding money, talking to the new employer..., logic says you are putting a giant bullseye on yourself if you do these things. The laws that are there to protect people from unscrupulous employers (not yourself) will come down on you.
Also, delete any disparaging posts about her appearance or personal life. That is "evidence" she could use as "proof" why she had to quit and lawsuit city.
Just my .02

Neither of the women in question seemed dissatisfied until they fell in love. They were both model employees. Everything changed when they got a man.

I think the parallels are interesting. The women were valued, treated well, well paid, and well liked, but when their love lives took flight we were suddenly not good enough.

The woman who just left forgot to "unfriend" the COO here on Facebook, so we were privy to her Facebook posts. Eighteen months ago she was gushing about how great her job was and how nice the people here are. Enter Tyrion, and all of the sudden we work her too hard, don't appreciate her, and don't pay enough.

Ironically, both women fell for men who had much, much lower career expectations for themselves and the women took jobs with much lower pay when they left here.

Yes, I've said mean things about her since she left. I'm pissed at her. We gave her extra sick leave last fall, extra snow days off because she can't drive worth a crap, bent over backwards to help her get back on track after she fell off the rails last fall. She lied to us, stole company property, and we found out from the IMs on her phone that when she was "sick" in November (and we were paying her) she was actually out of town with her boyfriend. I have no reason to respect her anymore.

no foul
 

This is the OT. he has nothing to apologies for. He is among like minded individuals here. WE ARE ALL JERKS! :D Yeh, if your the boss you have to be all PC at work and around normal people. But on here you are free to say what ever you want under the disguise of a user name. Heck this is one of the only places where I can say that some days I want to put my employees out on the curb for being idiots.

I had a staff member. She was better than average, solid worker but not a superstar. When she started with the company she had been promised a nice compensation package by the consultant who introduced her to the company even though he had no authority to do so.

She took the job at a lower compensation but it was a thorn in her side.

After I took over the group I promoted her twice. I got her a 45% pay increase in one shot and the max in other years. She had a medical condition that kept her from carrying to term unless she was on bed rest. The 1st kid was a financial burden for her so with the second kid I did not let her go on disability, I got her a laptop and we couriered work back and forth to her while she was out. She came back after kid 2 and had sever separation anxiety and sat at her desk for months randomly crying. Kid 3 I again kept her off disability, expensed a cable modem to be dropped at her house and opened my firewall for direct access to the servers and printers in the studio. When she came back, to avoid the separation anxiety thing again I let her come in one day a week for 2 weeks, then 2 days a week for a couple of week, etc.... until she was back full time. That also extended her maternity leave time significantly.

My group absorbed another group from within the company. One of the guys I inherited wanted my job so he convinced this girl that I had not given her the promotion she wanted because she was a woman and that she should file a discrimination complaint with HR which was stupid as that particular studio was predominantly woman, I tended to hire woman vs men at a rate of 2-1. All my top management were woman that I had promoted into their positions.

Naturally HR called BS, called the lawyers and circled the wagons.

During the next lay off HR took care of both of those problems for me.

I was speaking to the consultant who originally introduced her and she came up. He laughed, he said she was using him as a reference and he'd cost her 3 gigs already "because of what she tried to do to you".

I asked him to not do that going forward, told him yeah she's not terribly bright but she deserves a chance to earn a living.

You don't have to and should not respect her but put it behind you.

Just be happy she is no longer your problem.

Move on.

Enjoy life.

i talked to my lawyer about a friend that is getting harassed by an ex-boyfriend that has threatened to tell her current employer about somehting that could get her fired. i forget the term he used but he said if he says anything that could cause her to lose her job, he could be sued, not that he has anything, but the OP has something to lose. not a good idea unless he is put down as a previous employer and the new employer contacts him for info on her.

i would still draw up a letter to keep her from contacting or doing business with your clients. it may not stop her, but if she does you have at least informed her that she can not do it.

this part is probably not legal

Just a FYI Outlook has a built in recover deleted items feature built in that I've used in the past before having to go to exchange or backups.http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1397673538.jpg

Just make sure you have the folder highlighted they were deleted from.

We had an employee delete her emails, files, schedules and everything else she could and quit with no notice. Once we (IT) were notified we had everything back in short order but charges were still filed against her.