Protecting Employees' GDPR Rights

The GDPR has been in effect for a year now and, unlike many pieces of legislation, still remains quite prominent in the news today. Many businesses are still in the process of working out how to better comply (or how to comply at all), and others, particularly in high profile cases involving multinational tech giants, are starting to feel the sting of the GDPR’s infamously high penalties.

Whether you are still in the process of trying to “get it right first time”, or whether you were shipshape and Bristol fashion ahead of time last year, now is the perfect time to review your data protection position. Guidance and best practice are still emerging and will for a long time to come. Data protection compliance, like your use of personal data itself, does not stand still.

This is particularly the case in the HR context. All employers, regardless of the nature of their business, will collect, hold, and process personal data and, in a number of cases, special category (formerly known as ‘sensitive’) personal data.

Updated Employee Data Protection Policy

Following on from updates to our general data protection policy earlier this year, we have now updated our Employee Data Protection Policy template. Following a comprehensive review, this popular template now includes a range of new and more detailed provisions including helpful definitions of key technical terms, guidance on how staff should find out more about data protection within your business, sections covering important topics such as consent, and more specific coverage of the ways in which employees’ personal data will be used.

New Short-Form Employee Data Protection Policy

Also following in the footsteps of its more general counterpart, a new Short-Form Employee Data Protection Policy has been introduced. The idea behind the short-form template is to make a policy that is easier to navigate and quicker to refer to. Sections which are more detailed in the standard-length document are replaced with references to separate policies to create a more focused source of information.

This document, along with its standard counterpart, will receive further updates as we produce more focused policy documents, allowing us to replace additional sections in the Short-Form policy with simple cross references.