GUIDE: GDPR best practices for HR

With GDPR now a legitimate concern for organisations of all sizes, it’s vital that HR ensures they are compliant and able to deal with it in the most efficient way possible.

Here are some steps to take to make sure your HR department is compliant.

Why is HR compliance with GDPR Important?

Data protection policies are paramount to ensuring the security of your organisation. Employers hold a huge amount of sensitive data, such as their people data, and so to ensure the privacy due to their employees, HR must make sure their data practices comply with GDPR.

GDPR noncompliance penalties can go as high as 20 million EUR. Noncompliance can also result in a poor reputation for your company, losing your business and natively impacting your ability to retain or attract talent.

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GDPR Best Practices For HR

Data Mapping

HR teams should begin with a thorough data mapping exercise. All sources of people data should be identified, from contracts to performance reviews, as a full data inventory is crucial for GDPR compliance.

Transparency

Informed consent from employees around how their data is collected, processed and storied is important. Privacy policies should be easily accessible within your HR system – the better self-service your HR system offers to your people for accessing such documents, the more seamless their experience will be, and the less queries will come into HR.

Integrations

Integrations with third party vendors can be a significant risk to the security of the data held in your HR system. A single HR & Payroll solution, that also offers recruitment, L&D, performance and more can greatly mitigate these risks.

Be Considerate

Do not collect data that is unnecessary for HR. While data can be incredible valuable for garnering insights on how to improve your workplace, ensure that your team are not being excessive or inappropriate in their data collection.

Employee Rights

People teams need to be well informed when it comes to employee rights under GDPR. These include the right to access, rectify, and erase personal data, as well as the right to object to their data being processed. HR should have procedures in place to effectively respond to such requests.

Data Security

As of January 2024, 22% of UK businesses stated having experienced any form of cybercrime in the preceding year. Because of this HR must collaborate with IT to ensure sensitive people data is kept safe.

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Data Protection Impact Assessments

Data Protection Impact Assessments are essential when HR introduces new data processing activities or technologies. The assessments help organisations pinpoint and address any risks to employee data while ensuring compliance with GDPR.

Contingency Plan

Have a clearly devised plan for if your organisation does suffer a data breach. The individual responsible for data protection should be ready to report breaches to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) within 72 hours of discovery and inform the employees impacted.

Legal Consultation

Engage legal experts who specialise in GDPR and employment law. They can ensure your audit processes and data handling practices fall within GDPR compliance.

Employee Training

Make sure your workforce keeps their data protection training up to date. The training should cover GDPR principles. An HR solution that is able to automate reminders for IT training and flag significantly overdue training can be helpful for reducing HR admin in this area.

Retention Periods

Keep a clear retention period policy in place that is adhered to. For example, when employees leave your organisation there should be clearly defined timelines for the storage and disposal of their information.

As the only single HR and Payroll solution on the world’s number one cloud platform – Salesforce – xcd removes the risks and wasted time associated with multiple systems, hard copy paper forms, manual processes, duplicate data entry and data transfer. Read our free solution overview to understand how the xcd people platform could transform your organisation.