Access Information Your Employer Holds About You

Companies like information. Knowledge, they say, is power. So a business with a large pool of facts at its disposal must surely be a powerful one! This logic has some merit when applied to the business’s market, its competitors and its own products. However, when it comes to living people, there are laws governing how facts about them can be collected, stored and processed. This article looks at how you can defend your privacy by accessing the details held about you at work.

What Information Does Your Employer Hold?

There are three possible sources for the data your employer holds about you: yourself, your job and external sources.

The first of these is yourself. Any data that you have been asked to supply will be held in your file. If there is anything that you do not wish to be recorded, or consider to be unnecessary, you should consider withholding it.

The second data source is your job. In the course of your career, various facts relating to you will emerge. You will have appraisals. You may have extended periods of sick leave. You may be promoted, moved between departments, demoted, fired, rehired or disciplined. All these things are likely to flow into your personnel file, which will keep expanding until you leave the company to get another job or you retire.

Finally, facts about you may come from external sources. If your referees were contacted as part of the hiring process, any written references they supplied about you may have been kept. If colleagues or customers have made official complaints about you, these could also be on file.

The good news is that you don’t have to guess what data is held about you: under the Data Protection Act, you have the right to find out exactly what details your employer holds about you.

Accessing Your Details

The simplest way to get access to your records is to ask for them. If you have a personnel manager in your organisation then they are probably the right person to contact in the first instance. If you don’t know who to contact, ask your line manager to find out for you.

If the human resources department in your company does not receive many requests from employees for their records then they may try to dissuade you from accessing them or say they cannot provide them. Don’t let this put you off. There is no grey area here – you have a legal right to access your information, regardless of how difficult it may be for a disorganised business to pull your records together for you. All they can do is charge a minimal fee for access; they cannot deny it to you.

Changing Your Data

Having accessed your data, you also have the right to correct it if it is inaccurate. Your employer must act on these changes, amending its files so that they are correct. You may also have the right to ask for data about you to be deleted if you have reason to believe that it is not being used for the purpose for which it was originally collected, or if the business does not require this personal information in order to maintain its relationship with you.

Don’t be afraid to ask to see your employee records and other data held about you at work. After all, it is your data, and you have the legal right to see and correct it. If more workers did this regularly, privacy in the workplace would be less of a concern.