If you do not have no solicitation and confidentiality agreements signed and in place with every employee, you’re putting yourself at unnecessary risk.
We hold a lot of confidential information about our clients and about the agency inside our agency, and share it with our employees, and we want to make sure that that stays sacred and safe.
If you have those in place, I want you to consider renewing them every year with every employee. Why? A couple of things. Number one, sometimes language has to be updated. Number two, it’s a really great reminder for those long-term employees who signed those documents years and years ago that they’re still in place and they’re still being held accountable to them.
I have seen many agencies successfully defend against a former employee who violated a no-solicit agreement. I’ve seen many employers, agency owners, be able to course correct an employee with a confidentiality agreement reminder, whether they fired them or not, they were able to sort of put their behavior in place when they had that document to refer to and to remind them that they had signed that that document, and there are consequences.
This is something you’re going to want to have done in advance before the problem bites you. Seen lots of agency owners, very grateful that they had them, or very sad that they didn’t have them. Don’t be one of the sad agency owners. Go ahead and get that in place today and renew it every year.
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Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Johannesburg, South Africa. In the last week, I've had two conversations with different agency owners about the same topic, which reminded me it was time to have this conversation with you. If you do not have no solicitation and confidentiality agreements signed and in place with every employee, you're putting yourself at unnecessary risk. Now, a few years ago, the no competes, especially in the United States, were deemed – in a lot of states – to be unenforceable. But a no solicitation, which is you cannot solicit employees and you cannot solicit clients are absolute defensible in court and a confidentiality agreement is a duh. We all should have those. We hold a lot of confidential information about our clients and about the agency inside our agency, and share it with our employees, and we want to make sure that that stays sacred and safe.
If you have those in place, the next thing I want you to think about is renewing them every year with every employee. Why? A couple things. Number one, sometimes language has to be updated. Number two, it's a really great reminder for those long term employees who signed those documents years and years ago that they're still in place and they're still being held accountable to them. I have seen many agencies be able to successfully defend against a former employee who violated a no solicit agreement. I've seen many employers, agency owners, be able to course correct an employee with a confidentiality agreement reminder, whether they fired them or not, they were able to sort of put their behavior in place when they had that document to refer to and to remind them that they had signed that that document, and there are consequences.
So whether you have never done it, now's the time to do it. If you have them but they're old and dusty and you're not even sure where they are, find them and you want to have them reassigned every year. And every couple of years it's a good idea to run them by your attorney to make sure that they're still as ironclad as possible, and that they're going to protect you from a violation. This is not something you're going to want to wish you had done. This is something you're going to want to have done in advance before the problem bites you. Seen lots of agency owners, very grateful that they had them, or very sad that they didn't have them. Don't be one of the sad agency owners. Go ahead and get that in place today and renew them every year.
