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Avoiding Liability While Fixing Employee PCs?
ellem asks: "The upper management team of my company has made a decision that the IT department will work with employee's home computers and laptops. Despite every possible explanation of liability and the loss of proprietary information, the decision was made in order to satisfy a 'need' that the employees have expressed. Many of our employees are, in fact, independent contractors and could go elsewhere with little impact to themselves. Upper management feels offering this service to our employees will separate us from our competitors, and is so committed to this that they have allocated a special budget for tools, software and new hires to handle this particular segment of IT. However, I am still rather worried about general liabilities. While I can keep the network relatively safe and guard against certain types of file transfers, the fear I have is a tech wrecking an employee's home machine/laptop - whether they actually do or the employee perceives that they did. Are any of your shops offering this type of extra service? Do you have any policies in place to protect your company from liabilities that could spring up?"
That said, you may want to have the aforementioned lawyer draft up a legal-looking piece of paper that says "In the event my computer or data is hozared by incompetent employees, I agree not to sue The Company..." bla bla bla.
I think you probably should look at the technical aspects, too. Establish rules for the fixit shop, such as "Never plug an employee's home machine directly into the company network." Your service shop should have a firewalled safe zone that can get to the internet, but not to your internal network.
Bring in an experienced repair shop manager. Get someone who knows how to set up and run a safe workbench, and who knows how schedules, policies, etc. work. Have them run as an independent agency inside your company. He doesn't have to turn a profit (duh) but should be responsible for maintaining service levels, providing estimates and setting prices (you're not GIVING away brand new replacement 512MB nVidia cards, are you?) and have purchase authority.
John
So what if these are employee's home computers and laptops.
What liability is there that is greater than an retail Computer fixit shop?
...Just say no. If it's not yours, or you aren't specifically employed to fix it (by, say, a company), you're better off not doing it. Just about every geek goes through the same early phase: offering to take a look at any sick computer you hear about. But bitter experience teaches you to run screaming from any machine you're not actually contracted to service.
Special Liabilities? Yes, go to your local computer repair shop. Pick up one of their service forms with all the legalese and take it in to your corporate counsel and have them copy it. Hand it to the contractor/employee to sign at some point prior to the first time you go to work on their computer.
You do realize that there are lots of people who actually do what you are describing for a living, right? One upon a time about 10 years ago I managed such a shop. Your resistance to the feasibility of the idea seems to argue against you considering that all you are doing is basic PC work, just like lots of other people in your town do every day. There's nothing special legally in this case about the fact that you have an additional contractual relationship with the people you are doing the PC work for.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
It's a computer. Use a standard click-through disclaimer.
Seriously, just get with HR or whomever is in charge of personnel and have a simple disclaimer written up that states that anyone who takes advantage of this waives all rights to sue for damages. Make sure that it covers both the company and the individual contractor performing the task. Include this in the employee handbook or in the information packet that is given out to people when they are hired.
If one of your techs does wreck an employee's computer, I hope that your response is something better than pointing to a sheet of paper that the employee signed. Even the best technician will do something stupid on occasion, that's how people learn. It's much cheaper to just fix the problem and eat the cost. To do otherwise risks generating a lot of ill will and you may end up paying for it anyway, plus legal and court costs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Then they'll wonder why they can't get connected to their cable modem. Guess who will be driving out to their house since you can't troubleshoot that at the office? Yes, this actually became the expectation where I work. IT makes house calls. I wondered if they asked Buildings and Grounds to mow their lawns for them.
Next, what kind of liability are you going to run when the employee blames you for deleting (really really super important file)? Yes, I know you had nothing to do with the hard disk crash, but tell the CEO's son that when he just lost the first draft of his novel.
In all seriousness, here are a few suggestions
Good luck. You'll need it.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
When I started on the bottom rung of the ISP ladder in the 90s, I was doing dialup support. We only supported helping customers set up their DUN (or PPP or SLIP, etc.), DNS, install a web browser from FTP if they didn't have one and didn't want us to mail them a CD, and set up any one of a small palette of email clients to get mail from our servers. We later expanded it to tell people how to upload to their web space, when we added that. Oh, and the name of our NNTP server, if they asked. Officially, that was it.
:)
:)
Of course, ignoring the rules and accepting the calls from clueless clients on dialup who also had T3s with us, handed off by our veeps and prez, were how I climbed the ladder, started supporting broadband before getting trained, and eventually became a "customer engineer" (network engineer)
However, times have changed. You're an ISP, not their personal tech support. If it's not related directly to their connectivity through you, it's not your problem. Seriously. People aren't totally clueless about the boundaries of support any more (I'm not sure most of my "special issues" ever really were) and you've hit the nail on the head about the margins being such that it's not really worth it. If you don't have calls waiting, and the customer is really nice, sure, be the hero, and feel better for it afterwards. But don't let anyone demand or guilt you into anything your company hasn't promised. I've even encountered people who have done serious damage to their systems, and wanted me to help them outside official bounds, with their intent being that they would later claim that we wrecked their systems, and should pay their consultants for them. Just another thing to remember, when someone asks you to support their horrendously complicated issue
Personally i'd be more worried about data protection than hardware failure or human error. You'll have access to employees and colleagues PERSONAL data, which is different from business machines where what personal data anemployee puts on the machine is pretty much at their own risk.
I wouldn't be comfortable having access to that data. You might not be personally liable for damages but if a fellow employee makes the case to your employer that you have abused their trust you could soon lose your job.
Instead of running this home computer program in-house, why not just outsource the job to a local or national computer repair shop? That way, you can let someone else worry about the liability issues. As an added bonus, any standard computer shop will have far more experience in dealing with the kinds of problems that home computers typically encounter than you might have. That fact alone could easily make outsourcing a cheaper proposition then running the show on your own. It's definately food for thought.
In addition to these obvious advantages, outsourcing also allows you to accurately track the costs of the program and draw your budgets accordingly. You and your boss can sit down and allocate each employee a certain dollar amount of gratis tech support, which will avoid the problem of Sue in Accounting bringing her desktop computer in every day for a month so you can wipe out the latest spyware her son aquired while searching for Internet p0rn. Also, you can offer special services with an outsourced program, like in-home system repair for CEOs or, if you work with a national chain, remote repair services for the sales team.
Finally, you should consider the tax issues you could run into if you keep the program in-house. Technically, the type of program you describe could be seen by government tax collectors as employee compensation. That means someone is going to have to track who receives what services, because the government is surely going to want its cut too. With outsourcing, you sidestep all of these problems and are left to concentrate on your primary mission -- maintaining the corporate IT infrastructure.
Make sure you have a policy that very clearly establishes (in absolutely no uncertain terms) that you do not install unlicensed software on the machines, no matter who tells you to. Invariably, you will get some guy from accounting coming in demanding that you install Photoshop on his home computer "because he needs it for work." When you mention that you can't install unlicensed software, he'll go tell his boss, who will then tell you "to just do it." Nobody out there seems to give a damn about licensing issues except for the guy responsible for it. Everyone else takes the view of "well, we have a CD, so it's okay to put it anywhere." The one plus to all of this is that if you ever decide to take off, you can always put in a friendly call to the BSA... : p
This guy's the limit!
I would rather that the IT department of wherever i'm working at the moment doesn't touch my personal machine thank you very much!
Also, it sounds suspiciously like the first steps from management to get employers to use their own machines for work - a big no-no.
Furthermore, if your management wants to retain those employers that are both highly qualified and highly mobile i suggest flexible working hours, little or no overwork (or maybe pay-per-hour), a location that's easy to access via both car and public transportation and a proper work environment (3-6 persons rooms, no cublicles, plenty of elbow room).
If you're hiring contractors and then sending them to work at the customer's site there is little you can do to retain them - it doesn't take long for a contractor to figure out that they're best served by removing the middleman.
Beyond that, i know for a fact that one of the most important ways of streamlining the systems administration/support group work is to standardize the work machines (both HW and SW) so that for example, fixing a HW problem is just a question of backup/change-machines/restore. Doing that is simply not possible when it comes to maintaining the employer's personal machines.
If they're really keen on wasting money in this half-baked idea, they should outsource repairs/support of personnal machines to a company that's speciallized in selling those services to the general public.
Keep careful track of time spent on working on "non-company" PCs; if your boss wonders why you aren't getting work done, show him the numbers. Hopefully this won't impact your job much, but if it does you should let the pointyheads now how much time this leeches from your day. They are pretty good at understanding "we spent 40% of ellem's salary fixing employee's home computers".
I Am My Own Worst Enemy