Employee termination is a real serious issue facing any business owner or HR Manager. This is because if the termination process is not proper it can backfire almost immediately.

Terminated employees most probably do have any good opinion left of the company and the least he/she can do is to harm the reputation of the firm. Employee termination involves the whole of the company and is not just related to the Human Resources department. Precisely for this very reason, when an employee is terminated from employment, it becomes the duty of the HR Manager to keep all functional areas of the business in the loop.

This is the era of the IT/ITES companies and hence the harm done by a disgruntled and terminated employee can even be worse. Corporate files and information are confidential property of the firm and therefore it should be protected properly before someone can misuse it.

Most employees of an IT firm have access to the company’s network and client related data/files. When such an employee is terminated, proper care must be made to retrieve such confidential data from the employee. Therefore when an employee gets the termination notice, the IT department should be informed in advance.

The IT policy hence should be very clear as to who shall be informed by the HRD at the time of such termination. This IT contact person should then work with the HR Manager and disable all the access privileges (even remote access) of the employee on termination notice.

What all information an employee has access to, depends upon his/her department and work profile. Therefore the HR Manager should also contact the department manager and understand what all types of information/data the employee might have. E-mails are perfect records of communication between the employee and the client/company.

If during his termination process, the employee gets sufficient time to delete all relevant records of communication from the system and the server, the company will be at a loss during any future litigation process. Therefore IT department’s help is needed the most during such circumstances especially for a company dealing in IT and ITES.

The IT policy and HR policy should clearly state how data has to be preserved and how records have to be maintained for future references (legal cases). A well developed HR policy regarding employee termination hence needs to involve the IT department for its smooth implementation. This will help the company from facing any future problems such as information leak, identity theft, hacking, data theft etc.