Many companies are faced with a dilemma during onboarding when it comes to employment agreements. On one side of the issue is the desire to fully protect the organization's best interests at all costs. This is very evident in the way non-compete and intellectual property policies are written. Some employers take unprecedented ownership of every innovation an individual comes up with (whether at work or at home) as long as that person is an employee.
Who Owns an Employee's Creativity?
This has led to some hotly contested court cases over what a company can lay claim to and how. A recent case involving an employment agreement came down to a dispute over the exact wording used. In this situation, a worker claimed that his employer did not own an idea he came up with. The extensive agreement he signed did refer to inventions, designs, improvements, developments, processes - even "know-how". The employer's HR attorney must have cringed at having forgotten to include "ideas" on that list.
Of course, when employees are working in R&D or Marketing, the use of employment agreements makes sense. There is a high likelihood that an employee will come up with a useful and lucrative concept at some point. At the same time, workers in these fields are often well compensated so it can be argued that requiring such an agreement is not unfair or unduly restrictive.
However, there is some debate over whether every person in an employer's workforce should be required to sign such controversial agreements (and over exactly how they should be worded). Sure, you can get a new hire to sign almost any policy on their first day just because they are happy to have a job. But, starting people out by making them feel like they are signing away all their rights isn't necessarily going to endear you to them later on.
Acculturate Employees So They Want to Share
Is there a missing piece in this puzzle of how to get employees to value the success of the company they work for? In a recent Workforce Management interview with Dov Seidman, some interesting points about this "fortress" mentality on the part of employers came up. Seidman recommends encouraging compliance with policies that benefit your company by using inspiration rather than punishment/reward systems or authoritarianism. In this type of corporate culture, your employees would naturally bring their ideas and innovations to you rather than shopping them around to the competition.
This is one reason why acculturation is just as critical as gathering policy acknowledgement signatures in transactional onboarding. Your new hires should be introduced to a company that is interested in creating a win-win situation for everyone. Using the AllegroHR Acculturation Portal is a great way to start this process since it allows you to immerse new hires in your organization's history, current mission, and vision for the future in an easy-to-access online format.
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