With the introduction of GDPR just around the corner, we have included a few extra features in Workteam to help your organization’s compliance with the new regulation.

What is GDPR?

GDPR is a new set of European Union regulations that govern how companies should handle personal data. These regulations increase the responsibility for the companies that collect, store and process individuals’ data. It stands for General Data Protection Regulation and replaces the previous EU ‘Data Protection Act’. It comes into force on May 25th 2018. It applies to any organization that processes the personal data of EU citizens, including their own employees, regardless of whether the organization is located in the EU.

Data retention

One of the key data protection principles of GDPR is that data is kept for no longer than necessary, meaning employers will have to introduce a data retention and removal policy that will determine how long different data is kept for.

Workteam lets you specify exactly how long you will retain past employee’s data. When such retention periods expire, Workteam will recommend that the past employee’s data is either deleted or anonymized, providing you with the ability to do either.

You can now mark an employee as “terminated”, which will prevent the employee from having further access to the system but will retain all the data associated with their employment. At any time after termination you can use Workteam to search for all occurrences of personally identifiable information and Workteam will provide fine control over which data you wish to purge or anonymize.

The right of access to personal information

Another key principle is a data subject’s right of access to their personal information. In short, right of access means that data controllers (employers) are required to provide data subjects (employees) with a copy of their processed personal data upon request (a “data subject access request”).

With Workteam, employees already have access to most of their personal data held within the system, but for past employees, who can no longer access the system, there are new features to allow you to service a data subject access request. Workteam now lets you search for and export all occurrences of personal data for a particular employee, or past employee, in a computer readable format. Such data may then be emailed electronically to the data subject.

Click here to find out more about Workteam and how it can benefit your organization.

 

 

Simon Bates is CEO of Workteam, an HR Employee Management System for businesses of all sizes with a focus on growing employee engagement. Visit http://workte.am to find out how it can benefit your organization.