Ex employer keeps contacting me

[northchesterforest]

I was made redundant in January after 5 years in a role. They asked me to leave the same day. It wasn't personal as a lot of others in the company got the same treatment. The thing is, for the last two weeks I've been getting emails from my old boss asking where certain files are. Most of them were saved on my personal work g drive, which they are saying they can no longer access.

I must admit I wasn't great at organising my files for other people but I always knew where to access them, and honestly I was great at my job and a lot of what you would need to know was stored in my head, from working in the role for so long. I feel like they are accusing me of withholding information but do they even have a leg to stand on? Should I start ignoring them? I'm politely responding for now and trying to help them find things but I don't have access to anything anymore so there is only so much I can do?

Personally I would just be blocking their number and calls.
However if you want to cooperate, carry on. I wouldn't.

I wouldn’t co-operate, why should you? They dropped you like a brick when it suited them.

For the sake of peace and my settlement I'm going to be cooperative, for now

Why?

If you already have your settlement, what peace do you mean? 🤔

As long as you are following policy, you are OK - certainly from an IT system perspective. It's the IT departments role to ensure anything you are working on or with is adequately backed up and that you have the tools to do that.

These days with gDrive/OneDrive it's pretty much baked into the system. You sign into your PC and it quietly connects your local drives to the cloud and all your data in synced. Whenever I've managed estates like that I aim for an "any machine, any person, any office" policy. So you can turn up with your tinkly little laugh and say "I seem to have forgotten my laptop" and someone can just give you anyone from stores and everything syncs up when you log in.

The point being none of that needs you there. If you are let go it's trivial to assign your storage to someone else. Or archive it off.

Companies that can't manage their data properly are at risk of malware, ransomware, exfiltration, and worst of all (as Boeing are discovering) an enormous regulatory fine if they can't find the critical stuff.

For the sake of peace and my settlement I'm going to be cooperative, for now,
I don't understand this.
Peace? They keep bothering you. You're not getting peace.

Settlement? That usually means things are now closed and n.f.a. is needed.

The settlement agreement was for the termination of your employment.

So why are you now working for them for free

Either get a salary per hour for your time spent in these calls or state you don’t work there any longer.

They were the ones who got rid of you so they should have got everything they needed to know beforehand

They can get these files if they get IT to recover these files but they choose to use you because you are free.

If you want the calls to stop then stop pandering to them otherwise they will continue to use your free service

So they didn't leave you time to effect a proper handover and are still contacting you months afterwards even though everything is on their systems? That sounds like CF territory to me.
For the sake of them not giving me a shit reference and ending the constant phone calls, I would suggest to them that you arrange a day for you to come in, sort out the files on your personal drive/ effect a handover. That you can't answer their queries because you don't have access to the documents anymore. That your fee for the day is X.

I suggest a consultancy rate of £500 per hour. Start by sending a bill for the time you've already spent on the phone with him.

(I suspect that he is contacting you off his own bat, not at the request of the company, so when that bill arrives he will be asked WTF this is for and when he tells them, he will be told to stop contacting you.)

Gosh, if it were me, I would just block their number and get on with my life.

I’d be backpacking South East Asia and not giving the ex-employer a moment’s thought.

How can you even help if you don’t have access to the personal drive anymore?

If this was happening to me, the very loaded word "harassment" would start to appear in misty letters in front of me.

I repeat: decent IT procedures should allow for any foreseeable eventuality. Suppose the OP won the lottery* ?

(*The less positive version is "was run over by a bus")

Similar thing happened to my daughter but they'd used a minor typo to fire her just inside the two years then she got calls from the boss asking various questions about work she'd been handling. When she quoted her consultation fee they stopped calling.

FFS the OP clearly signed a SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT people. Her being co-operative isn’t weak, she is likely contractually obliged to be so.

Her former employer paid her more money than it had to and may therefore claim the money back if she tells them to fuck off or tries to charge them for simply asking her to comply with her obligations.

She was paid more money than standard redundancy pay and in exchange for that extra money she will have likely provided undertakings in the Settlement Agreement to provide reasonable future assistance. Such clauses are standard but of course only the OP, her employer and OP’s lawyer will have seen the actual agreement itself and know its exact content but the clauses I am referring to are bog standard.

Of course whether the assistance the employer requires is reasonable is a consideration but, as the OP herself admits she didn’t save things in the right place, it seems reasonable for an employer to ask her where stuff is likely to be saved. They aren’t asking her to work for free, they are asking her to tidy up her own mess.

Settlement Agreements have repayment clauses if they are breached. There are usually clauses that require co-operation and you usually give an undertaking that you performed your role competently. OP should check her Settlement Agreement and if unsure contact the lawyer who would have advised her on it (it is a legal requirement to get legal advice on such a document and the employer usually pays the legal fees to ensure this step is taken and the agreement is binding).

The OPs original failure to mention the Settlement Agreement is a bit like someone posting “My ex husband is insisting on having the kids every other weekend, can he make me do this?” and not mentioning that this has been already been ordered by the courts.

OP should check with her lawyer as to the exact wording of her SA and take a view from there.

Various people claiming you need to pander to them because of your settlement and the risk they might sue you. What a load of fear mongering nonsense. For starters, none of those people have actually seen your settlement agreement. I haven't either but I am very confident that it will not include a clause along the lines of "As part of your enhanced settlement, you are obligate to lend any and all assistance to anyone from Old Co who reaches out to you. This obligation is not time bound and will follow you to your grave". Even if it did include such a clause, it would be legally unenforceable - employment and contract law takes a very dim view of clauses that any reasonable person would consider ridiculous.

You don't morally (nor almost certainly legally) owe them any assistance. Even if you had been a bit sloppy in your work, that is as much your management's fault as yours, unless you were sloppy to the point of being criminally negligent or fraudulent. It's also worth bearing in mind that there is a very clear distinction between your former employer and your former manager. Your former manager is just an employee of your former employer and them contacting you does not mean the are doing so as formally authorised and instructed by your former employer. They almost certainly are not.

I wouldn't bother with the suggestions to email them your hourly/daily consulting rate. It's not going to happen and it just comes across as passive-aggressive and childish. Just tell them sorry but you can't help. Take longer and longer to reply to their emails or just ignore them altogether and don't take their calls if they try phoning you. they will give up.

They should have a procedure for moving all your files to the shared space, IT can access them.

FFS the OP clearly signed a SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT people. Her being co-operative isn’t weak, she is likely contractually obliged to be so.

It's not a magic spell you know. As long as the OP was doing their job as laid out be the company then it won't cover "help us if our IT turns out to be a bit Disney". And the company are free to take the OP to court if they want to push that and publicise their incompetence a bit more.

What’s the phrase? “Failure to plan on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine” Absolutely!
I say, 'your problem isn't my issue.'

I agree with several other posters that you should try to wrap it up by saying something like:

"I'm sorry I can't be of much help - all of my files were on the company drive under either my name or on the shared drive. I, of course, no longer have access to any of these areas and as several months have passed I don't have a clear recollection of where everything was. If you need access to the files stored under my name you could ask IT if they can help. Sorry I can't be of more help northchester."

If they haven't then they aren't really a proper company. This is IT management 101.

If it’s your personal work G drive they should be able to access it via the IT team and they shouldn’t need to contact you at all. Since your were asked to leave the same day it’s their problem they didn’t do a handover.

FFS the OP clearly signed a SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT people.

The OP says she was one of a load of people who were fired on the same day. That means HR and management went through a list of names, or perhaps list of departments, and decided who they could do without, turn off their badges, disable their IT access, cardboard box for the photo of your dog and the spider plant, "no hard feelings eh".

OP will have signed, at most, a boilerplate settlement agreement, the kind that thousands of people who are laid off every year have to sign to get their payoff. It will contain minimal clauses about confidentiality, not an open-ended commitment to keep on doing the job, remain contactable by phone or e-mail for an indefinite time, etc.

No way would the company come back months later and start to sue someone they had fired under those circumstances. It would be hugely embarrassing, and "I don't remember" would be a perfectly adequate defence. It seems to work for almost every senior executive or minister who's ever been put in front of a public inquiry.

You seem to have made up a whole scenario here about what the OP signed.

How can you possibly know what the settlement agreement said? Are you the former employer??

If you're not going to need a reference from them, I'd just ignore them.

IT should be able to access your personal drive and access everything.

(If you deleted the files before you left, this may well become an issue.)

If it's relevant projects, reports etc etc that others need to use and not just your personal notes, it shouldn't be only in your personal drive.

Next job, ensure everything is named in an easy to recognise format and stored in the appropriate library on the shared drive.

For now, you no longer work for them.

If you haven't deleted content, inform them every minute you spend assisting them will be billed as a self employed consultant. You don't have to be a limited company - I'm not. Send the invoice when you get the request, and offer any assistance you can - on payment.

They will either pay up or go away.

On the subject of settlement agreements. I was made redundant two years ago. My employer was a FTSE-100 organisation and also one of the Global-100. That means they had, like all organisations of that scale, the resource and the requirement to have armies of HR and Legal people. They know exactly what best practice looks like and they know exactly what is permissible in law. I have my termination agreement in front of me. My obligations in summary were:

1. To ensure all outstanding expense claims and charges to my corporate credit card were settled.
2. To return all company issued equipment (laptop, mobile phone etc) on or before the termination date.
3. To not disclose or use for my own purposes any confidential information acquired during the course of my employment.
4. Any inventions or copyrightable materials created by me during the course of my employment remain the property of the company.

Various other clauses around references, right to appeal, outstanding or future claims relating to personal injury, Employment RIghts etc. Nothing whatsoever relating to providing ongoing support and assistance and I would suggest those posters claiming this is either permissible or common are talking nonsense. I got a pay-out that was orders of magnitude greater than the statutory minimum so that has nothing to do with it either.

Absolutely.

The comment was about the poster quoted who posted negatively about OP but clearly hadn't bothered to read the thread.