Come on. You want to get hired, you need to sign the NDA. It’s standard form and also a contract of adherence. No go, no job. Especially in bigger firms, where there’s no time to waste f’in around. You need to have standard legal terms so your legal team can be sure where they stand.

A lot of this isn’t really NDAs but anti-competitive contracts, and it is hard to enforce anti-competitive contracts for longer than you are paying someone.

If we are talking top management, I feel it is essential to ensure that it is not in their financial best interests to reveal company proprietary information, and that may require some kind of long term financial incentive.

In Poland you can’t place any restrictions on someone that would prevent them gaining fruitful employment, even in exactly the same or similar profession, thus things like social media relationships just couldn’t be preserved.
At the same time, very specific information about a project can be preserved, thus a past employee would probably be restricted from revealing exactly how something was achieved, how money changed hands etc.
However that wouldn’t prevent them suggesting using those very same tactics with a future employer, as it becomes knowledge and skill required to perform their professional trade.

There is nothing like money - if a key employee leaves under good terms, continue paying them a bonus or royalties based upon their previous duties or sales - maybe not the full amount, but enough that they wouldn’t want to damage that relationship.

I find the biggest danger is the reverse - employees taking with them proprietary knowledge that your business requires to continue, or just cannibalizing clients because the business was built upon specific relationships with the employee.

I don’t think contracts are an effective way to protect that situation, because if someone walks away and takes your clients with them, there is a high chance you were undervaluing the contribution that employee had to the business.

Sure you can throw up legal and ethical barriers, but ultimately everyone has to eat.

In my opinion, Employer/Employee NDA’s are an absolute necessity. A business will have a very tough time surviving if they spend their cash and resources training their future compeitition - competition with an inside knowledge of their company’s inner workings.

I recently read a book by Jim McIngvale called “Always Think Big” in which he chronicled his transition from employee to business owner. His employer and mentor operated a furniture store in Dallas. Mac was the top salesman/salesmanager and had many contacts in the Dallas area. He could have easily set up shop where he was established, but he considered it unethical to use the training and investment that his mentor had given him to compete with and draw business from his former employer. He moved to Houston to start his business and maintained a mutually beneficial network with his former mentor.

However, not every employee has these sorts of scuples. Without an NDA, an employer is vulnerable to a barage of destructive opportunism.

I think the dividing line of master list publication is a reasonable concept. If someone I work with introduces me to a business connection in the line of duty and they become my friend-the contact and friendship belongs to me.

We’re all public people to some level and you can’t NDA relationships and the low-level of favors that spring from such relationships.

Now, if someone were to publish your master list on the web…that would likely be a violation…but so long as that doesn’t happen, all the former employee would be taking from you is a “relationship” that might have been developed while being employed with you but isn’t necessarily tied to it.