Balancing Security and Privacy

In the modern workplace, corporate concerns, governmental regulations, and employee morale require businesses to perform a balancing act. A balancing act that respects employee privacy protects the company from malicious actors and adheres to compliance and jurisdictional rules such as financial reporting requirements or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Balancing employee privacy and securing your business is more straightforward than it appears. The regulatory concerns will generally be satisfied when a company creates initiatives that include their employees' privacy considerations while communicating a clear corporate security policy.?

Develop Clear Policies:?Create an employee privacy policy that outlines what type of personal information the company collects and its use. This policy should outline the company's stance on employee privacy and the steps taken to protect it.

Your employee privacy policy process begins by determining the information your company will collect and its use.?

The most common are names and financial information for payroll and taxation purposes. Depending on your industry, you might need to monitor employee social media accounts or web and communication histories on company equipment.?

Clearly define the types of information collected, their use and who will have access to the data.?

Your employee privacy policy needs to outline the protections and processes the company will implement to protect the employee's information.??

These protections should include strong encryption, limiting access to sensitive data, and requiring strong passwords and 2FA security codes for anyone with access.?

Communication:?Balancing your employee's privacy and your corporate security is an exercise in trust. Build trust with open and direct communication between your business and your employees.?

When your employee privacy policy is ready, clearly, and effectively communicate it to everyone in your organization.

The reactions to your new policy will elicit various responses from your teams; employees who are new to working with heightened security protocols might offer pushback. Communicating the importance of corporate security and protecting corporate intellectual property is put in place for everyone's protection. It's the same policies that will keep their personal information protected from malicious actors.??

Training and education:?To implement the employee privacy policy smoothly, you'll need to invest in training and education programs for your people on privacy and security.?

Training programs are an excellent opportunity to explain the importance of the employee privacy policy, and it's an opportunity to educate your teams on other areas of corporate security that go hand in hand with privacy.?

Protecting employee data naturally leads to discussing data security within the larger company.?

Openly sharing the risk of data breaches with your people and how it harms the business through the loss of financial data, customer trust, and damaged reputations demonstrates your belief that they play an essential role.

Through the training, explain the consequences of these losses to the company and their security by making it relevant to their specific job functions.

Demonstrate how they are an ally and an active participant in protecting the company's data by teaching them to use the best practices in safeguarding everything in their purview. Teach them to identify and act against potential security threats in simple, relatable language that avoids tech jargon.?

Involving everyone in the process encourages your people to be active partners and feel invested in protecting your company data.?

Recognize and reward employees who report potential threats to demonstrate that everyone has a valuable role in protecting each other's privacy and securing the company from malicious actors from inside and outside the company.?

Protecting your company data and your employees' privacy is everyone's responsibility, and it begins by developing a clear and comprehensive employee privacy policy.?

Quartz Enterprises offer the full scope of best-in-breed corporate information and infrastructure security services to safeguard the confidentially, integrity and availability of our client's information.?

To learn more about how we can help your business, please contact us to set up a consultation.?