WITH GROWING numbers of Generation Y employees entering the workforce, and a workplace environment that is expected to be increasingly fluid, companies will have to put in place more stringent measures to protect their corporate knowledge and intellectual property, according to a national law firm
WITH GROWING numbers of Generation Y employees entering the workforce, and a workplace environment that is expected to be increasingly fluid, companies will have to put in place more stringent measures to protect their corporate knowledge and intellectual property, according to a national law firm.
Loss of corporate knowledge and leaking of business intelligence to competitors has always been a risk for companies. However, these will become critical issues to many businesses in the future, owing to a greater number of people being in jobs for shorter periods of time.
“Given indications that Generation Y employees frequently stay in jobs for short periods, the challenge for employers should not only be to find ways of supporting staff retention, but rather also to seek strategies for protecting the company’s ‘corporate databank’ of knowledge, and saving its business intelligence from falling into the hands of competitors through increased workforce circulation,” said David Thompson, employment law partner at national law firm Hunt & Hunt.
Many Generation Y children saw their parents suffer the effects of retrenchment in the 80s and 90s, Thompson said, and they interpret the concept of loyalty in a different way from previous generations, which tended to equateloyalty largely with number of years’ service.
“It is not to say that Gen Ys are disloyal,” he said. “They do expect to receive and give loyalty in their workplace. But, unlike their parents, their concept is instead based on honesty and respect between management and employees rather than committing to a lifelong career with one company.”
This increased mobility could be detrimental to a company’s competitiveness and as such, Thompson said, companies need to work out more effective ways in which to protect their corporate knowledge and intellectual property from employee turnover.
“At the same time, companies should also be looking at ways in which to implement more sophisticated methods of knowledge management, so that they can capture as much of their employees’ knowledge as possible, in the time that they are with the company.” While the saying that people are a company’s greatest asset has become almost a corporate mantra, guarding one’s intellectual property and corporate knowledge, when people are moving around with increased regularity, is going to become more of a priority, Thompson said.
