Garden Leave Investigations

Garden leave, or gardening leave describes a situation whereby an employee leaving a job is instructed to stay away from work during the notice period, while still remaining on the payroll.

This practice is often used to prevent an employee from taking sensitive information when they leave their current employer. Garden leave helps employers to protect their business interests.

Placing an employee on garden leave in the UK often involves asking the employee to:

• Refrain from any service for the company
• Not to attend the business premises
• Not to use company equipment
• Refrain from business contact with clients, suppliers, and employees.

Garden leave reduces an employer’s risk of losing clients, colleagues, useful information, or a combination of the above to competitors, which can translate into a significant loss of income for businesses.

At Global Investigations we are often asked to intervene and assist employers in making covert and overt checks into the validity for gardening and leave absence.

The Benefits of Garden Leave Investigations

We realise that investigating your employee’s garden leave is a sensitive topic. However, breaching the agreement can be paramount to your business, so the sooner you find out about the breach of contract, the bigger chance you have to save your company from further damage.

If an employee is found to have breached their contract, the employer may be entitled to take further legal action.

What We Can Do to Help

An employee may have agreed to the restrictive covenants and yet our clients often get suspicious or perhaps have had a tip-off from others that suggest interaction with employees or clients.

Common situations where we undertake garden leave investigations include:

• A tip-off a former employee is being head hunted by a competitor – we can help to assess if your employee is sticking to any ‘non-compete’ clauses that may be in place.
• Loss of clients in the former employee’s specialised area – our discreet investigations can assess if your employee has contacted your clients and possibly persuaded them to move their business elsewhere.
• Sharing intellectual property – if a business suddenly launches a product very similar to that which your ex-employee was working on, we can undertake investigations to assess any collusion between the employee and competing business.

How We Gather Information

Global Investigations commonly carries out gardening leave reviews, which will employ multiple combinations of open-source intelligence together with undercover approaches such as covert surveillance.

Get in touch today

Internal impact assessment checks can be undertaken by our team and this research often allows us to find the best starting point for your case. These investigations often reveal or uncover cases of fraud and allow the clients to undertake legal proceedings or settlements.

All our enquiries will be conducted lawfully and will be fully compliant. We may also suggest the use of in-depth background enquiries normally combined with covert surveillance techniques to identify the current status.

Call us on 0208 287 7770 to discuss how we can help your business during this transitional period.

See also: 
 Workplace fraud > background checks> 
covert surveillance