Employees are concerned about how secure their personal data is when stored by their employer, according to a report from HR software solutions provider Cezanne HR, seen exclusively by HR magazine.
A quarter (26%) of the respondents said they had concerns about their employers storing their personal banking details, while 19% said they were worried about their contact information being stored safely.
However, only 7% of those polled said they would not want any information at all to be held in this manner.
At the other end of the spectrum, 74% said they would be comfortable or very comfortable with booked time off data being held by cloud-based systems.
There were no significant differences in attitudes or opinions between the younger or more mature respondents; for instance, the survey recorded that while 40% of the younger group (age 18 to 34) thought mobile access to HR data would be useful the older group (age 35 and above) were only just behind on 36%.
Sue Lingard, marketing director at Cezanne HR, explained that education is key when it comes to helping workers feel safe when their employer needs to store their data.
“Data security is a shared responsibility,” she told HR magazine. “Employees need to understand what the company is doing to protect their data – and what they need to do themselves. This includes keeping passwords secure and not sharing them; not sending out sensitive information by email, a password-protected Excel spreadsheet is easy to hack; and being aware of the latest scams – like the trick played on an HR employee at Snapchat, who inadvertently handed over payroll data to a phisher."
Lingard said that companies should not hold back from using cloud-based systems just because their employees may have reservations. “They could be your biggest allies since it seems that the majority of them can see how they could benefit,” she said. “Make sure that you take the security of your HR data very seriously, whether it’s on a spreadsheet, in a paper file, or online. Once trust is lost it’s very hard to build it again.”
