SINGAPORE – Forwarding sensitive business data to your personal e-mail account is a no-no and can land you in big trouble, especially if you have plans to leave your company.
This was what a senior employee who resigned to join a competitor found out when her former employer successfully sued her for various misdeeds, including conspiring to divert business away from her company while she was still an employee, and for acting against its interests.
People in the habit of forwarding work-related e-mails to their own accounts for various reasons may not be aware that most companies have clear policies that prohibit such conduct.
Doing this may not land you on the chopping block immediately but such misdeeds can be detected if your employer conducts a check.
Such evidence usually provides good grounds to sue employees who leave to join competitors, especially when the forwarded e-mails contain business data.
In this case, the senior vice-president of an insurance broker not only forwarded business e-mails to her own account, but was also caught dealing with her company’s competitor while still being employed.
Ironically, she was exposed not because of an e-mail she sent, but because of one sent by her junior male employee who had left earlier to join the same competitor.
The employee forwarded an e-mail containing the competitor’s business data to the woman’s personal account, but for some undisclosed reason, she forwarded this e-mail to her husband’s account.
When the husband saw that e-mail, he forwarded it to her work e-mail account. This led to the discovery of the digital trail, which enabled her former company to sue her, her subordinate and her new employer.
High Court Judge Mohamed Faizal noted that while employment disputes often involve business diversion, the customers can always choose to deal with the parties that they prefer.
But the freedom of client choice does not confer a freedom on employees to “quietly orchestrate transitions behind the scenes” and ignore reasonable employment provisions that bar them from working with competitors for a certain period.
“The evidence before me paints a troubling picture – a pattern of calculated circumvention by individuals who, while still formally employed by one company, were actively furthering the interests of another,” said the judge, who ruled in favour of the former employer.
Here are three important findings from the court that all employees should know.
When companies make important internal announcements via e-mails, such documents are usually encrypted to prevent copying or forwarding, to lower the risk of unauthorised sharing.
Of course, this will not stop employees from taking photographs of those e-mails if they still choose to leak such information through their social media channels.
Doing this puts their jobs at risk because most employment contracts contain specific terms that prohibit the unauthorised sharing or usage of corporate information, no matter how mundane such data can be.
If the information turns out to be confidential business data, those who are caught can be sued and be made to pay huge compensation sums, even after they have left the company.
In this case, the company went after its senior employee after she joined a competitor because she was found to have forwarded a number of e-mails from clients that contained business data to her personal account.
She argued that such documents were just routine communications from clients and that there was nothing sensitive about them. But the court disagreed because the employee wrote the term “highly confidential” in the subject title for one of these e-mails.
Her former company said she forwarded those e-mails to her personal account because she had intended to use such information in her new job. But she argued that she had done that because she wanted to continue working at home and that it was easier to download information from her personal account.
While she could access her corporate e-mails at home using her then employer’s virtual private network (VPN), she claimed that the network often had issues that made it tedious to reply to them.
But the court found that she had raised the VPN problem as an excuse because there was no evidence that she needed those e-mails to work at home. For instance, she had replied to the clients in one of the e-mails in the office before forwarding that same document to her own account.
The court also found that she had forwarded a blank e-mail that contained only attachments of business data that she had saved on her laptop. As she could already access such data on her laptop even when she was offline, there was no reason why she still had to forward these files to her account.
The court found that she had breached confidentiality while she was still an employee, as forwarding the e-mails was “motivated by a desire to retain access to sensitive information that would likely be of value at her next employment”.
There is a difference between having a side hustle to earn more money and working for a competitor while still being employed.
While some employers would probably turn a blind eye to part-time work in an unrelated job outside official work hours, they will draw the line for those who surreptitiously work for other companies as part of the preparatory effort to join them.
In this case, the woman was caught working for her new company as its senior employee while serving out her notice period. When her subordinate, who had left earlier to join the same employer, had problems with his employment pass then, she wrote to appeal to the authorities as if she were already his supervisor.
If a former employee approaches you for help, there is nothing wrong if you give advice or even show how to solve the problem, as any good mentors would do.
But the woman went beyond giving advice and drafted the appeal note herself. This was not even a case of coaching a former colleague to write better because she later forwarded the appeal note directly to the person handling the case in the new company, without even copying the message to her subordinate.
The court found that she was actively working for her new employer in breach of her duties because she was still an employee of her former company then.
If you have betrayed your former employer, you cannot try to undo the harm by saying that you have delivered great work in other areas.
In this case, the woman claimed she still worked hard to renew contracts with other clients in her final months at the company.
But the judge noted that the law is concerned not with how hard one works but with how faithfully one acts.
“Diligence is no defence to disloyalty and an employee would therefore not be able to justify a breach of the core obligation of loyalty and fidelity by ostensibly pointing to dedication, however significant, in other areas,” the judge said.
In the end, the court found the woman and her subordinate liable for a series of work-related breaches, in addition to conspiring with their new employer to set up a new competing business.
The damages that both the employees and the new employer would be liable to pay will be assessed in a separate hearing.
So the lesson here is simply this: Be a loyal and good employee until your last day of work so that your employer would miss you more after you leave.
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