When you take your work laptop and phone home, you’ll forget that these company-owned devices belong to your employer. But that might be an error .
“Don’t use your office computer as your personal filing equipment. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at employment , that equipment doesn’t belong to you,” said Joanna Grama, associate vice chairman of Vantage Technology Consulting Group.
Being laid off may be a rude awakening to the present fact.
As a layoff survivor who’s witnessed colleagues lose their jobs, too, i’m conversant in how little time you’re given between learning you’ve been laid off and losing access to years of labor and priceless personal items you’ve stored on your phone and computer.
I once saw a colleague scramble to save lots of a photograph of his son off his laptop once we got an hour’s notice before we lost access during a mass layoff. At one turbulent job, a co-worker diligently came to figure like every day might be her last, saving her in-progress projects on a separate disk drive at the top of each shift.
The best time to organize for your layoff is while you continue to have the work . If you recognize a corporation restructuring is imminent, strategize what you’ll take with you off your company equipment and what you would like to erase.
1. Do remember that IT security can monitor what you copy . Don’t take any information that’s proprietary.
Through Google’s Takeout service, you’ll download and export everything in your G Suite like Docs and Sheets, but remember that your employer may notice what you’re doing. G Suite Business and Enterprise allows administrators of audit logs to ascertain who has renamed, created, edited, deleted, uploaded, downloaded or shared a Google Drive file, for instance .
This same sort of surveillance goes for Slack, a well-liked productivity software employed by office teams. On company-owned Slacks, administrators can have access to non-public direct messages.
If you’re wondering what you’ll or can’t save, Grama recommends reading your employee handbook. In these handbooks ― or in your employment agreement ― you’ll see guidance outlining what information is proprietary, or confidential data associated with your company’s “businesses, strategies, operations, financial affairs, organizational matters, personnel matters, budgets, business plans,” as Lawinsider defines it.
If exporting contacts is allowed, Gmail and Outlook each have detailed steps. For Gmail, you’ll attend Google Contacts, which keeps track of your frequent email contacts, and choose “export.” it’ll save the contacts you chose into a .CSV spreadsheet.
For Outlook on a PC, attend “File,” select “Open & Export,” and it’ll guide you thru the choices of saving your contacts as a .CSV file on your computer.
2. Do filter out personal passwords and cached words.
Web browsers and social media applications like Facebook can save passwords and cached words to make shortcuts, but it’s an honest practice to sign off of these applications and clear cached words if you think that a layoff is approaching. “You don’t accidentally want the IT team knowing the password or having the ability to urge into any personal applications,” Grama said.
Grama also recommended requiring two-factor authentication on your devices to guard your personal data more albeit the password is cached.
If you’re suddenly laid off and have little or no time before you lose access to your work devices, Grama said you’ll still ask your employer to urge your private stuff back with language like, “Hey, I even have some incidental personal material stored on the device, pictures and personal calendar appointments. Can an IT person sit down with me while I recover these personal items?”
3. Don’t erase work files.
While you ought to remove anything personal that you simply wouldn’t want your company to possess access to, like personal contacts and emails, Alison Green, founding father of the workplace advice website Ask A Manager, said that “personal” means things that are unconnected to your job or your company.
Employees shouldn’t erase work files. “That are often considered an enormous deal and may affect your professional reputation if it’s like attempted sabotage,” Green said.
4. Do confirm your contact information is up so far .
If your layoff is immediate, you would like to form it as easy as possible for the corporate to succeed in you regarding taxes and benefits information.
One practical step recommended by Ashley Watkins, employment search coach with corporate recruiting experience, is to form sure the address where your employer sends W-2 forms and financial and benefits information is correct.
“That’s how you’ve got access to tons of your financial information,” Watkins said. “If it’s getting to your old address, you’ll catch hell trying to seek out out what you would like to vary .”
5. Do save anything associated with your performance and invite testimonials now.
Watkins said that her job search clients often regretted not grabbing documents associated with their performance while they still could.
That’s why her top recommendation is to save lots of evaluations and “anything that speaks to your performance” if you simply have time to copy one thing. If you’ve got longer , Watkins recommends checking to form sure everything associated with your job search, like your LinkedIn account and access to job boards, is tied to your personal email address.
Green recommends saving performance reviews, work samples and get in touch with info for people you’ll want to be ready to reach within the future, as long as this action isn’t forbidden by company policy.
One discreet thanks to build those connections together with your co-workers is thru LinkedIn, in order that you’ve got how to contact them outside of labor . Remember that you simply might not be the sole one who wants to network if your job feels unstable. “Chances are if you’re brooding about a layoff, so are your co-workers,” Watkins said.
Customer and client testimonials could even be useful to start out gathering now, and there’s how to ask without making it clear that you simply are preparing for a layoff. Watkins said professionals can invite testimonials with language like “‘As I’m preparing for my next performance review’ ― or whatever could also be the case ― ‘I’d wish to need to have some real-life documentation of what people say about me,’” Watkins said.
