Back in the 1950’s stealing in the workplace was pretty black and white.  If you worked on a production-line creating widgets and you took a widget home – you knew very well that you had stolen this physical property.

Nowadays however, not everything falls neatly into the category of a product or a service.

In the information age – many of our jobs depend on us processing just that – information. And it’s not like companies can simply put up a metal detector the way they could to see if a widget is in our pocket.  – Information resides in our minds – invisible to others and not very useful to the organization if we keep it there.

You probably didn’t mean to steal it! – In fact you probably never even thought about it this way.  But as technology changes so does our work.  Once we understand the true nature of the materials that our jobs involve – be it physical materials, or in this case information – we can then understand our responsibility to help move ALL those materials along.

Think about it this way, when you are paid to gather, assimilate and pass along data, it is the same as if you were paid to gather materials, create a widget and pass that widget to the next person.  In an information age, information and data is now the property that companies are processing and profiting from.

So – with new types of work existing, there also needs to be new boundaries to define an employee’s responsibility.  Any information that you are paid to earn, gather and process is your responsibility.  It’s your job to comment on the data, to give an opinion, to help translate it so it will be valuable to your colleagues and clients…and if you do not help this data or information to progress down the line – it leaves the building in your mind the same way that widget would have left in a pocket

Do you have colleagues who hold onto valuable information without sharing?

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