Table of Contents
In Short
- Data protection laws apply to all employers processing employee or candidate personal data. Compliance is mandatory to avoid legal risks and maintain trust.
- Recruitment, monitoring, and managing health records are common activities that require careful data protection consideration.
- Review your processes to ensure they meet UK GDPR and DPA 2018 requirements, supported by legal advice if needed.
Tips for Businesses
Provide employees and candidates with clear privacy notices explaining how their data is used. Secure all personal data with robust measures like encryption and access controls. Regularly review and update data retention practices, and establish procedures for handling subject access requests. Demonstrating compliance builds trust and reduces legal risks.
Data protection is a critical legal responsibility for employers acting as data controllers. If your business collects, stores, or processes personal data about employees, workers, or candidates, you must understand that strict data protection laws apply. This applies to employers of all sizes, from large to small. From CVs you request during recruitment to health records for managing sick leave, most stages of employment usually involve handling personal data, which must comply with data protection laws. The UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) set out mandatory legal rules you must follow when you process personal data. This article explores why data protection is a key obligation for employers and answers practical questions to help you understand how specific compliance obligations could arise.
Why Does Data Protection Matter to Your Business as an Employer?
As an employer, your business handles personal data throughout various stages of employment. When you hire new staff, manage their performance, or monitor their activity or device use, you must comply with UK GDPR and DPA 2018 to the extent that such activities involve processing their personal data.
You must meet these obligations to avoid exposing your business to financial penalties, regulatory scrutiny, and loss of employee trust. Non-compliance can also lead to employee complaints and claims, adding potential further financial and reputational risks. Your business must, therefore, implement strong data protection processes and practices to avoid these risks and comply with the law.
Examples of Data Protection Obligations
As an employer, you may wonder how or when your legal obligations apply. In practice, many obligations arise under data protection laws, sometimes in scenarios you might not expect.
Here are practical examples of data processing activities and their implications:
Are You Collecting Candidate Data During Recruitment?
You will typically collect and process personal data such as candidate CVs, interview notes, and references during recruitment. You must inform candidates about the collection of their personal data through a clear candidate privacy notice. This notice should explain why the data is collected, how long it will be kept, and their rights under UK GDPR.
Are You Monitoring Your Employees?
If your business monitors employees (e.g., through CCTV or email tracking), you must do so transparently and in accordance with data protection laws. For instance, it must clearly explain the purpose of monitoring, where it occurs, and how the data will be used.
Are You Processing Employee Health Information?
Do staff share health conditions when signing off work due to sickness? Employers often handle health data when managing absences or arranging medical assessments. Health data is classified as special category data, which requires extra safeguards and compliance with complex data protection law rules.
Do You Retain Staff Records?
Your business will likely retain various HR records, such as staff information and addresses and payroll details, performance reviews, and disciplinary notes, which could contain personal information. You must identify a lawful reason for processing personal data. It is vital to consider this carefully, and relying on consent is problematic in the employment context due to the power imbalance between employers and employees.
You also need processes for managing and deleting personal information when it is no longer necessary. A clear data retention policy helps you achieve this.
You must also provide staff with a privacy notice explaining what data you process about them, why, and for how long.
This factsheet sets out how your business can become GDPR compliant.
Are You Securing Employee Data?
What happens if poor security leads to a data breach, leaking sensitive staff details to third parties? This can result in employee complaints and enforcement action.
Your business must implement robust security measures to protect data from loss, misuse, or unauthorised access. Examples can include encrypting data, restricting access, and using strong passwords.
Suppose a breach occurs that risks individuals’ rights. In that case, you must notify the ICO within 72 hours of becoming aware of it if it reaches the data breach reporting threshold, i.e. if there is likely to be a high risk to individual rights and freedoms.
Do You Know How to Respond to Employee Data Rights?
Under the UK GDPR, employees have legal rights, such as access to personal data. Your business must have processes to respond promptly to subject access requests, which could come from any member of staff you process personal data about.
As such, a number of practical employment scenarios raise data protection considerations and obligations.
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Understanding How to Comply With Your Obligations
Understanding your data protection obligations requires carefully reviewing your business’s data processing activities.
Your business must assess how it processes employee data and determine the appropriate steps you need to take to comply with UK GDPR and DPA 2018. To ensure compliance, you should seek legal advice to understand your specific obligations as an employer.
A data protection lawyer can review your data processing activities and help you implement the correct compliance measures.
Key Takeaways
Data protection is a core legal obligation for employers, particularly due to the vast volumes of personal data typically processed during employment. Compliance is vital to avoid legal penalties and maintain employee trust. You must review your data processing activities, determine your legal obligations, and ensure you always comply with data protection law rules. By handling personal data lawfully, you can demonstrate yourself as a compliant and accountable employer.
If you need help reviewing your UK GDPR compliance as an employer, our experienced Data, Privacy & IT lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents. Call us today on 0808 196 8584 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Employers process data such as CVs, payroll details, employee contact information, and health information. Employers must comply with UK data protection law rules when they process personal information.
Compliance is mandatory and protects your business from legal penalties, data breaches, and reputational damage. It can also build employee trust and demonstrate accountability.
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