And if you don’t believe me ask BP bosses and the oil company exec who got fired when her husband made $US 1.76 million insider trading on information overheard on a work call.
Tyler Loudon used to work from home in the Texas apartment he shared with his wife, a mergers and acquisitions executive for the giant oil company BP.
Criminal conviction and divorced
But after using information from his wife’s work calls about a $US 1.3 billion takeover Tyler is a convicted criminal, and his wife has filed for divorce, after being fired herself.
Clearly he was a moron for making such a huge trade on confidential information, but you’d have to imagine BP have knocked Working From Home (WFH) on the head, and for very good reasons.
Wake up call for businesses
But this isn’t just a wake up call for one big company who got dragged into a massive SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission) investigation that dumped its reputation in the toilet. It has to be a warning to every business that routinely handles customers’ confidential information.
And I can’t be alone in seeing this entirely predictable case as the death-knell for the idea that a domestic home is a right and proper place to carry out company business.
All businesses use private client data
Whether you’re a plumbing company with client address data, including when they are not home; a legal firm with complicated and very private cases on the go; a politician; an estate agent, or pretty much any business you can name, you have obligations to stakeholders to keep their information private.
New anti-WFH laws?
Quite obviously private homes are not secure places to carry out company business.
The gravity of this situation is now so obvious that new laws could well be the best solution.
However I think companies already have plenty of legal and commercial reasons to jack in WFH completely to keep their clients’ data safe.
Working from home must go!
So now we have productivity, health and safety, and data security as reasons why WFH is financially and legally ruinous, and I don’t think there is any woke lobby that can continue to demand the right to work from home.
I would end with ‘RIP WFH’ but what I really mean is good riddance to bad rubbish!!
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