Nonemployee workers may make organizations and individual employees vulnerable to security breaches. Although your first impulse might be to be friendly and help them settle in, you truly don’t know them.
If your company didn’t conduct a thorough background check of anyone who comes on site, including vendors, risk escalates. How can you protect yourself against potential physical, professional or legal harm?
Take a look at this group. Research completed in August by MBO Partners of Herndon, Va., estimates a base of 16 million United States residents “who find work on their own, such as consultants and contractors,” explains CEO Gene Zaino.
They’re all ages, working 15 hours per week or more. An enormous 70 percent of them say that companies call on them for their specialized backgrounds, which means that they may be “experts.” In two years, Zaino predicts that the group might well surpass 21 million. You might not think twice about risks attached to these highly skilled, professional workers.
This data reflects a trend likely to continue, one corporations and businesses will encourage in our project- and results-oriented workplace. However, the 2011 Employment Screening Benchmarking Report conducted by HireRight, whose global headquarters is in Irvine, points out that 52 percent of almost 1,800 responding HR, security and other professionals from a wide range of industries don’t screen and don’t plan to, even for criminal activity. The person who enters your workplace might not be quite what you expected him or her to be.
YOUR OBLIGATIONS
The prevalence of workplace homicides suggests that you can’t even know well the people who work at your company full time. What risks are you likely to encounter with others?
Workplace violence comes up most frequently when speaking with clients, according to Terry Wood, director of Engineering and Security Applications at the headquarters of G4S Secure Solutions - Americas in Jupiter, Fla. He coordinates global security efforts involving physical, electronic and procedural security.
Wood cites other frequently mentioned risks in “internal theft, loss of intellectual property and terrorist threats, the last most prominently in chemical manufacturing and nuclear energy environments.”
He states that if the custodial service at your company isn’t vetted, you create risk by leaving confidential documents, including business plans, on your desk or elsewhere.
Employment attorney Carolina Avellaneda, a partner in the Boston office of McCarter & English LLP, based in Newark, N.J., offers advice on how to avoid fraud and trade secret violations. She says to ask a supervisor what information to share, but definitely not “passwords, especially administrative passwords ... or documents contain(ing) an individual's name with another identifying element, such as a credit card number.”
She further recommends taking these steps:
• locking confidential files away where the worker can’t gain access:
• setting your computer so your “screen locks up and password protects when away from (your) desk for any period of time;”
• when you share confidential information, having the worker acknowledge the information as confidential, whether it has to do with trade secrets or a customer list, and “remind(ing) the (individual) of your company's protocol – lock it, shred it, protect it;” and
• making certain you report security breaches.
MBO’s Zaino maintains that companies need to screen non-employee workers as well as their employees. He remarks that if your organization “isn’t caring enough to do an appropriate background check, I’d go look for a different company, because you don’t want to be exposed to people who are unethical or who cause physical harm.”
In the absence of screening, he finds company culture deficient and the employer negligent.
Dr. Mildred L. Culp welcomes your questions at culp@workwise.net. © 2011 Passage Media.
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