Handling employee data is a complicated process. That is the case for both small and large companies.
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It is a central part of an HR department’s assignments and area of responsibility to handle these pieces of data. Examples of employee data include name, address, civil registration number, account details, age, job title, salary, seniority, further education, courses and certifications, closest relatives, and other things. These pieces of information are often personally sensitive, and the handling of them is governed by law. It is therefore important, that the handling of your employees’ data is safe and complies with the GDPR.
Data handling can be time-consuming as well as a big administrative task – especially if it is done manually. But with digital HR systems it is possible to streamline the processes. It eases the workload for your employees, and it diminishes the risk for errors and oversights.
Here, we provide you with an overview of what you need to pay attention to when handling employee data, and what you can do to ease, streamline, and digitize the daily handling.
Step one: What do you need to ensure in order to handle employee data safely and effectively?
Before you start gathering data, there are numerous things you need to take into consideration.
- Ensure quality assurance
It is crucial that data and processes are ensured a certain quality, so your data is valid and provides reliable insight. That applies to, for example, consistent data formatting, and processes should have specific triggers applied to them, so they are used to propel your company forward.
- Ensure integrations between systems
It is also important to have dataflow and integrations between systems. It has e.g. a big significance for your company’s efficiency that its recruitment processes can exchange data with your HR system, so that you can maintain an overview and reduce the administrative work in relation to typing data into systems manually. - Ensure flexibility in the handling process
Handling and using employee data has to be simple and flexible. That entails, among other things, that it needs to be easy to configure in an HR system. You might, for example, have a specific need to know who have taken a first aid course. In this case it needs to be simple to add such an information box, that you can use, filter, and make searchable.
Step two: Streamline the data collection and data handling
It is important that data – particularly personally sensitive data – is handled in accordance with the GDPR and other internal policies. For this reason, it is necessary to keep an overview of who have access to what. It is also relevant to make this data collection easy and manageable.
- Handle data access with user management
In order to ensure a compliant data handling, user management (with clearly defined user roles that either give or limit access to employee data according to relevant regulations) is a useful tool. Alternatively, the data handling demands strict guidelines that you need to ensure that all employees abide by. It can be hard to check, and it introduces a risk of human errors.
- Utilise self-service as a solution
Having access to a self-service HR solution frees up many working hours. It might be that information about an employee needs to be updated. This could be address, bank, registration of holidays and absence, or other things. Instead of the HR department needing to manually gather and type up all these pieces of information, the employee can fill out and/or update information quickly and easily.
- Implement a correct deletion policy
Timely deletion of data is critical to any company, and it is necessary for a GDPR compliant handling of personal data. It is a time-consuming thing to do manually, and an automated solution is therefore preferable.
Step three: Analyse your data and use it to make decisions
With an effective, streamlined, and correct data gathering, the HR department can now pull valuable knowledge out of the gathered data. It can form the basis for the management’s decisions and have a positive effect on the company’s operation and strategy going forward.
- Make statistics and reports
Seniority, sick days, absence, gender distribution, competences, and many other things. Statistics and reports can provide an insight into the employee pool in many different areas, and it can guide your focus onto imbalances or new areas where you can improve.
- Get an overview of your employees’ work history
An overview of your employees’ history is relevant in order to give an insight into your employees’ professional development. It could be an overview of positions, departments, salary development, or further education in the form of certificates and courses. This knowledge can also be utilised as the basis for your employee retention effort.
- Get more knowledgeable about your company’s development
You can also use the overview to generate data regarding the development over time. It can give insight into where the company is headed and where you can make an extra effort, optimise, or adjust things in order to reach set goals.
A well-integrated HR system can help you and your company achieve all of the things mentioned above. As the collected data can come from many different sources, it is important to have a system that can handle, categorise, and integrate it into your system. When the system is set up and ready to go, you can – with just a few clicks – pull out work-history data on all your employees, and you can also choose if you e.g. want to see data on employee-level or department-level. You will also be able to implement user management, which ensures that employees only have access to the data they have a right to see, and your employees can also correct relevant information about themselves via the self-service solution. Furthermore, an automated HR system can ensure a correct deletion policy where errors and oversights don’t occur. You can also make adjustment to the deletion policies, so they are GDPR compliant but at the same time tailored to your specific needs.
Are you ready to utilise an easy and manageable HR system? Then Talentech can help you.
