Stolen property | Employee steals Apple's tech secrets - here's how to minimise breaches

As a business, your reputation and your product are absolutely everything.

If anything were to jeopardise these two things, it can be seriously damaging to your firm and can also be personally upsetting. What can make you even more upset, however, is knowing that a former employee has breached your trust by speaking ill of you, logging back into accounts they shouldn’t have access to, or sharing your ideas or data with a competitor.

Recent headlines have revealed that a former Apple employee has been charged with stealing tech related to the company’s self-driving car innovation and has given the highly sought after information to a Chinese tech company for their own developments. Such sensitive information being given to competitors, particularly in countries that have tensions with yours, can be problematic for a variety of reasons.

Knowledge Portal

Where's the stapler? | What to do if you think an employee is stealing

This situation highlights the importance of instilling loyalty in your employees, so that even if they leave, they still have respect for you as an employer and wouldn’t do anything to hurt or jeopardise your business. There are so many factors to an ex-employee feeling sour towards you – feeling overworked or underappreciated during their time at your firm or being at the brunt of a toxic company culture can be reasons why ex-workers might want to compromise your success.