subject: The Role Of The Confidentiality Agreement With Shredding Services [print this page] When you hire a company to come to your location and shred documents, you are doing so in order to protect information. There are various types of information that you could be trying to protect by shredding documents, but it is always information. You could be either protecting it because you are required to by the law, or because it is to your own organizations profit to do so. Either way, you need paper shredding companies there are going to help, not hinder, your goal in protecting that information. That is why confidentiality agreements are an important part of doing business with shredding services.
If your company doesn't yet have a company hired to take care of your shredding needs, then you want to keep the requirement of confidentiality agreements right in the forefront of your mind while you are looking for such a company. The most important thing in a shredding service is that they are willing to sign any kind of confidentiality agreement that your lawyers tell you to put in front of them. The best ones will have some of their own that they offer to sign as part of their everyday business contracts.
When you do business with a company that is coming in to shred your documents, you are potentially leaving yourself wide open to any exploitation of trust that they might choose to pursue. As such, you have to be sure that they are legally obligated to uphold that trust, which is the purpose of the agreement. You should have the management or your account holder at the company sign such an agreement when you first hire them to shred your paperwork.
That shouldn't be the end of it however. It is important to realize that the people that come to your office to actually shred your paper are rarely going to be the same people that you met with in the office when you first requested services. As such, you should have separate agreements that you also request for every employee of the company that is going to be handling your paperwork to sign.
If a shredding firm or an employee of one ever refuses to sign this kind of agreement, it is the best possible sign that you shouldn't do business with them. They should be used to doing this with every company that they do business with, and shouldn't treat it as unusual or a burden if they are a quality company.
