Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee
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At this point, calling the police seems to be a good option.
We don't currently deploy any remote wipe software on home users pc's. After thinking about this, we will be blocking apps and disabling the USB ports on the laptop's with Sophos Central in our off-boarding process. When they can't open IE, Chrome, Firefox, or Office apps the laptop becomes pretty useless. Along with disabling USB that can't transfer files to their jump drives. It may motivate them to ship back the laptop since it becomes a big paper weight as long as they are not smart enough to slave the drive.
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@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@Pete-S said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When a remote employee is terminated how do you handle the collection of the hardware (laptop, docking station, printer, etc..)? In the new company I work for, almost 60% of the workforce is working from home throughout the US. Our HR department is out-sourced, but we have 1 main in-house employee that does HR tasks to help bridge the gap between the out-sourced HR service and internal employees. Employees are typically terminated over the phone by their managers. The IT department is then tasked with the collection of the hardware. This includes contacting the terminated employee over a personal email, or personal cell phone number. We are also tasked with working with the shipping manager to prepare a pre-paid shipping label and box to ship the equipment to the employee’s residence to send back the hardware.
It’s been a major challenge getting hardware back from the terminated employees. For obvious reasons, the fired employees are hard to get ahold of, and are difficult to work with. We are sending 1,2, 3 emails and/or calling the employee multiple times.
When the IT department proposed the holding the paycheck to VP’s until the hardware is returned, we were told it’s illegal. In all my previous companies I’ve never had to worry about this. This was always handled by HR or the fired managers employee. Is this normal? How can I get this task off our plate and worry about more important IT related tasks?
It's really easy. You should just follow the company's written procedure how to handle the equipment of terminated employees.
If the procedure isn't working, management needs to change it or just accept that they wont get the equipment back.
Because why should the fired employee even bother with packing and shipping back the company's used equipment? They don't work there anymore. You need either a stick or a carrot to convince them and right now it's neither.
The company has no written procedure. Can anyone point me to where I can find a template for this?
Rather than a template on this it might be worth understanding the rules regarding this.
Sorry that may be a paywall, it loaded one minute and now that I'm relooking at it. . .
An employer cannot withhold a terminated employee's paycheck until equipment is returned. ... An employer might be able to deduct the cost of the equipment from the final pay of non-exempt employees. The specific circumstances of the situation and state wage deduction laws will determine whether an employer can do this.` -
We have our employees (office-based and home-based) sign a company equipment agreement upon their hire. It states along the lines that they agree to care for all company equipment they are issued and return in proper working condition upon termination of employment. Failure to do so will be considered theft and lead to criminal prosecution. On the employee's last day they are informed that any vacation accrual they have will be held for payout until the equipment is returned. This usually does the trick for us. I've only had to threaten police action with a former employee once before the laptop magically showed up a couple of days later.
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@sully93 that's not a bad process/policy but it very much is dependent on where you live and work. It may be completely illegal to withhold any pay or benefits at termination, regardless of the reasons.
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@sully93 said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
We have our employees (office-based and home-based) sign a company equipment agreement upon their hire. It states along the lines that they agree to care for all company equipment they are issued and return in proper working condition upon termination of employment. Failure to do so will be considered theft and lead to criminal prosecution. On the employee's last day they are informed that any vacation accrual they have will be held for payout until the equipment is returned. This usually does the trick for us. I've only had to threaten police action with a former employee once before the laptop magically showed up a couple of days later.
@sully93 I like this approach. I'll leave the whole vacation accrual up to HR and accounting, but I like the failure to return equipment can lead to criminal prosecution company equipment agreement.
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@magicmarker Unless you are your companies decision maker, make the suggestion, don't make the policy.
It's the businesses choice to have to draft and possibly enforce any policy.
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@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@Pete-S said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When a remote employee is terminated how do you handle the collection of the hardware (laptop, docking station, printer, etc..)? In the new company I work for, almost 60% of the workforce is working from home throughout the US. Our HR department is out-sourced, but we have 1 main in-house employee that does HR tasks to help bridge the gap between the out-sourced HR service and internal employees. Employees are typically terminated over the phone by their managers. The IT department is then tasked with the collection of the hardware. This includes contacting the terminated employee over a personal email, or personal cell phone number. We are also tasked with working with the shipping manager to prepare a pre-paid shipping label and box to ship the equipment to the employee’s residence to send back the hardware.
It’s been a major challenge getting hardware back from the terminated employees. For obvious reasons, the fired employees are hard to get ahold of, and are difficult to work with. We are sending 1,2, 3 emails and/or calling the employee multiple times.
When the IT department proposed the holding the paycheck to VP’s until the hardware is returned, we were told it’s illegal. In all my previous companies I’ve never had to worry about this. This was always handled by HR or the fired managers employee. Is this normal? How can I get this task off our plate and worry about more important IT related tasks?
It's really easy. You should just follow the company's written procedure how to handle the equipment of terminated employees.
If the procedure isn't working, management needs to change it or just accept that they wont get the equipment back.
Because why should the fired employee even bother with packing and shipping back the company's used equipment? They don't work there anymore. You need either a stick or a carrot to convince them and right now it's neither.
The company has no written procedure. Can anyone point me to where I can find a template for this?
That standard answer would be... get it from HR or management
LOL, not something many of us would have around.
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@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When they can't open IE, Chrome, Firefox, or Office apps the laptop becomes pretty useless.
LOL, what does that take, five minutes to work around? Not much of a deterent.
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@scottalanmiller said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When they can't open IE, Chrome, Firefox, or Office apps the laptop becomes pretty useless.
LOL, what does that take, five minutes to work around? Not much of a deterent.
We are talking about a standard user with no admin rights. The Sophos policies will block all browsers, office applications, USB ports, and PDF readers on a per device policy. Why would a standard user have a work around for this in 5 minutes? At that point the users only option is hire a tech to slave the drive and copy the data. The Sophos policies just make it harder to use the pc after they are terminated.
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@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@scottalanmiller said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When they can't open IE, Chrome, Firefox, or Office apps the laptop becomes pretty useless.
LOL, what does that take, five minutes to work around? Not much of a deterent.
We are talking about a standard user with no admin rights. The Sophos policies will block all browsers, office applications, USB ports, and PDF readers on a per device policy. Why would a standard user have a work around for this in 5 minutes? At that point the users only option is hire a tech to slave the drive and copy the data. The Sophos policies just make it harder to use the pc after they are terminated.
Reinstall OS, done. Possibly reflash BIOS/UEFI if that is locked down. That's at the longest possible time. I've forcibly removed a locked down Sophos without benefit of the unlock code before. 5 minutes is a little long for that in my personal opinion.
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@travisdh1 said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@scottalanmiller said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
@magicmarker said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
When they can't open IE, Chrome, Firefox, or Office apps the laptop becomes pretty useless.
LOL, what does that take, five minutes to work around? Not much of a deterent.
We are talking about a standard user with no admin rights. The Sophos policies will block all browsers, office applications, USB ports, and PDF readers on a per device policy. Why would a standard user have a work around for this in 5 minutes? At that point the users only option is hire a tech to slave the drive and copy the data. The Sophos policies just make it harder to use the pc after they are terminated.
Reinstall OS, done. Possibly reflash BIOS/UEFI if that is locked down. That's at the longest possible time. I've forcibly removed a locked down Sophos without benefit of the unlock code before. 5 minutes is a little long for that in my personal opinion.
The user still needs to hire a @travisdh1 to do that for them. It's still annoying to them. Users are not going to know how to slave a drive and re-install an OS. So factor in the users time to find a computer tech and then pay for the work to be done. It's not 5 minutes.
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There's Absolute Security. But that's more for securing your devices than obtaining your hardware.
You can lockdown and track the device location but that doesn't mean you will get your equipment back.https://www.absolute.com
https://www.absolute.com/platform/editions/From Dell
https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/help-me-choose/hmc-absolute-computrace -
@black3dynamite said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
There's Absolute Security. But that's more for securing your devices than obtaining your hardware.
You can lockdown and track the device location but that doesn't mean you will get your equipment back.https://www.absolute.com
https://www.absolute.com/platform/editions/From Dell
https://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/help-me-choose/hmc-absolute-computraceGreat point. I wanted to look into those programs. The Sophos block policy isn’t going to get me very far in getting the hardware back. At least I feel like I still won since they can’t freely use the laptop without wiping and reloading the OS. My point is that the pc becomes more useless to the employee. They MAY be more inclined to return it.
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Hardware is not worth the fucking time to get back.
If the company thinks wasting man hours on that is a good idea the company is insane
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@JaredBusch said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
Hardware is not worth the fucking time to get back.
If the company thinks wasting man hours on that is a good idea the company is insane
Thank you! I completely agree. Trying to convince my company this idea is difficult for me right now.
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After all that, why doesn’t the company work on something like an RDS or Terminal to Server system that way the data and application is not on the user’s machine? Or even better think about a web app or anything that doesn’t depend on your hardware.
Also you might be able to disable tamper protection on the client for Sophos however the best thing for someone using Sophos Central is to have the MDM to allow the wipe of the computer, it will wipe the minute that computer hits the internet. Also the Sophos lockdown with the agent is very annoying but I have gotten it to work for the reasons this topic started but HR took care of getting the laptop back and not IT.
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We are going through the same in our company. What we do is Jamf lock the systems so they are unusable and ship them boxes and return labels.
I reached out to our legal department about holding back pay, but it is illegal because it is for work performed. What we did discover is that we could deduct the cost of the equipment from the paycheck, but we have not done that yet.
Currently, my team (IT) is FedEx-ing an empty laptop box and bubble wrap, tape, etc... To each employee. My employees and are keep stock of boxes and packing materials in our homes. What I would like to find to alleviate the workload to my team, is a site that we could order and ship directly to the user the packing materials. I know Fedex sells the laptop boxes in store, but does not ship it.
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@Eve6 said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
I reached out to our legal department about holding back pay, but it is illegal because it is for work performed. What we did discover is that we could deduct the cost of the equipment from the paycheck, but we have not done that yet.
You can, in theory, in certain states, but you want to be really, really sure that a court will agree that they don't own the equipment. Many companies leave it pretty unclear who owns what.
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@scottalanmiller said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
Can't do that legally for US employees though, in most cases.
I worked a place that kept your first week's wages as a deposit against hardware (yes, this is weirdly legal at least in Texas).
Eventually, it got silly as more and more of the office switched to BOYD (The rule dated back to when they issued $600 smart phones and laptops that cost 2K).
This was technically in the signed work contract but many people angrily found out about it after their first paycheck was kinda "light". -
@JaredBusch said in Obtaining hardware from terminated remote employee:
Hardware is not worth the fucking time to get back.
If the company thinks wasting man hours on that is a good idea the company is insane
While I largely agree, our R&D laptops are ~2-3K a pop. (fully max spec' MPB or XPS with onsite repair agreements).
I did hear we have started on the Mac's using DEP, so the device will auto-enroll in MDM even if the device is wiped.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204142
