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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?
1. Maintain a fast server with plenty of storage space.
2. Get a good disk imaging program to make a full backup before any work is done.
3. ???
4. Have updated resume listed on all major job search websites.
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.
And this doesn't answer your question, but, seriously: WTF?
How sadly misguided is this? If they want to give employees and contractors perks, how about something with a little more common sense. Like healthbenefits (for contractors) or gas/travel vouchers. Both are something people would be glad to have and have tax benefits to the company. Or how about spa gift certs or something where there's little liability.
Alternately, they should subcontract the work out (Clearly they have no problem doing that). Get GeekSquad or something out there to do it for you. Sure, the liability is a headache for you, but I can't believe that any marginally responsible company would take on the infrastructure to do something like this. Maid service for all employees would be cheaper and have less overhead. And I'm sure would be a nice perk.
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!"
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!
- They run MS Windows and these boxes just tend to "magically" degrade unless periodically re-installed. Except you can't do that because the user will lose something, because they don't have backups, original distribution media with which to reinstall applications (or even the OS itself), registration keys, etc.
- They run applications (MSIE, MS Outlook, MS Word, MS Excel) which in turn are vectors by which other malware comes into the system. You can't tell a user "Ok, I made it so that your machine is secure now," when the user has the habit of running MSIE to look at websites on the Internet(!) or is in the habit of loading untrusted data+macrocode into MS Word. (And of course they do these things while logged in as an administrator.) When things go wrong again, these people always complain later that you didn't really fix their problem. It's not like you can tell users to stop shooting themselves in the foot.
Legal department can care of the liabilities. The real thing to think about is: does anyone who does generic PC support, really want more customers? And these people you're talking about, aren't even paying customers. Holy crap, what a great way to lose money and make everyone hate you at the same time.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.