Starting A Business? Make Sure You Understand Employment Law
Before you start a business and start hiring employees, you need to make sure that you have a firm understanding of employment law or are employing the services of an attorney who can assist with employment and labor law advice.
Take Steps to Keep Trade Secrets Secret
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you are taking steps to protect your trade secrets. Trade secrets are not just formulas to make some special type of food or product. Trade secrets are things such as your list of customers, formulas you use to move your business along, and other methods that are special to your business.
If you have trade secrets, you need to set up steps to protect these secrets. Protecting these secrets includes savings them behind password-protected programs, not sharing this information with people outside of your company, and limiting who has access to this information.
This becomes an employment issue because you need to take steps to ensure that any employee that you hire understands that these are trade secrets and that they do not disclose them to others. The best way to ensure that is by having all employees you hire sign confidentiality agreements that establish what your company's trade secrets are, and make your employees agree to keep them secret.
Create Formal Workplace Policies
As a new business, you may want to promote a lax and cool attitude to new hires. However, to legally protect yourself before you start hiring employees, you need to write down your workplace policies and procedures. These should include information about how employees are able to use the computer, email, and phone at work.
Make sure that you have formal policies in place for using electronics at your workplace, and let employees know if you will be monitoring their activity and what type of punitive actions will take place if they abuse these policies.
Go over your workplace set-up with your attorney to figure out what other type of workplace policies you need to put in place.
Before you start hiring employees, you need to have formal, written workplace policies and procedures in place, and you need to have a confidentiality agreement ready for employees to sign before you start hiring employees for your start-up. Work with your local labor law services to create these documents to ensure that you are covering all of your ground and to ensure that everything you write is legally appropriate and provides you with the need