Organize your employee and personnel administration. So you always have control over data and comply with GDPR

Salary, working hours, holiday, sick leave, maternity, GDPR, and employee benefits. The administrative setup in a company involves a lot of data and information that is important to keep track of and process throughout the employment period. Professional processing and updating of employee data result in happier employees who feel seen. Even after ten years.

Why is employee administration important?

Let’s be honest. Employee administration is not always an exciting task. Nevertheless, it is extremely important to manage from appointment to departure. Ensuring that it is being taken care of is often challenging. Who is responsible for ensuring that employees' salaries and working hours are updated, that holidays and absences are registered and that sickness and leave are noted? And who keeps the employee handbook up to date? Then there's also GDPR. Do we have the necessary consent and delete data within the applicable time limit according to regulations?

These may be very basic questions—but there are many of them. And it is essential to be able to answer them well and quickly to offer a smooth employee journey. Where your employees feel that you are managing their data correctly, remember their holiday wishes, and register their new account number for salary payment.

Make employee administration easier to manage in daily work

Long, practical to do lists call for effective work methods. We have gathered three pieces of advice for your administration processes, to ensure you can free up time and perform your work tasks smarter. 

1. Run secure document handling
   
   Correct handling of documents such as contracts, test results, medical reports, criminal records, and the like is central in a top-tuned workplace. Manual and troublesome paperwork, where you have to print, scan and send signed documents, only makes it more difficult to ensure streamlined document handling, which also meets legal requirements and GDPR regulations in relation to the storage of personal data.

    

   Make the process easier and faster by running document management and handling signatures digitally. In a digital system, you can control who has access to what—and thus minimize security breaches. By sending documents for digital signature, you avoid inconvenient paperwork. It saves both you and your employees time, that you can spend on other important tasks.

    

2. Let the employees update their master data
   
   It can be somewhat impossible to keep up to date with address changes and lists of relatives in a busy working day with professional tasks that require full focus. But master data can also contain competencies, courses, acquired skills, reasons for absence, and the like—and this is important information that can be used strategically and for business development. A complete overview of your employees' skills gives you important data and insights you can use to develop both your business and your employees in the right direction.

    

   Remove a manual, time-consuming task from your desk and have the employees update their own data. In an HR IT-system, you can set up regular reminders for each employee, asking them to update their information. You decide how often they should be reminded. Whether it is a change of address, a new phone number, a new course, or something completely different, the employees update it themselves. No more bottlenecks, legal complexities, and regrettable oversights.

    

3. Collect all employee data in an automated system
   
   The many manual tasks can be eliminated by using an automated system for storing employee information. In Emply's employee module, you can easily search for and find employee master data, absence information, contracts, course certificates, and development plans—all in one place. This is a huge win for you, so you don’t have to store and update data in many different places.

    

   Through automated reminders and checklists, outdated employee data will become a thing of the past. The employees update their information themselves—and you receive notifications about important changes. You will therefore have time for other valuable tasks that can develop your organization and workplace.

Three important rules to remember about GDPR

The tightened rules from the EU in 2018 set new (challenging) requirements for data protection and processing of personal data for companies and organizations. There are rules for the types of information you must collect as a company, how long you can store them, and what documentation requirements you have towards your employees..

Employee administration involves lots of personal data. It is demanding to fulfill and familiarize yourself with the rules, so that you don’t do anything wrong. An HR system can ensure the necessary data security, so you automatically obtain the necessary consents and delete data after a certain number of years.

However, there are some general considerations you can make for your company. Read them here:

GDPR in recruitment: What information is relevant for you to know as a potential employer?

In employment situations, the good—and difficult-to-define—requirement of relevance applies. What is relevant and necessary for you to know about your future employee for the job they are to be hired for? For example, it will not be considered relevant to ask about the candidate's marital status, political orientation, or physical injuries, if you are hiring an office assistant. Familiarize yourself with which personal data require which processing basis (authorization) so you don't make any missteps.

GDPR and employee data: All employees have the right to know what data you process about them.

As an employer, you are obligated to provide information regarding employees' personal data. Conversely, the employee has a right of access to his own personal data. The difference is that you as a company have an obligation to actively inform your employees about what data you store about them, whereas employees have the right to ask for insight into the data you process about them. The data can usually be found in reports of employee interviews, contracts, communications/emails and absence statistics.

GDPR upon resignation: Remember to include all data when you delete personal data.

Generally, your company must delete a resigning employee's data as soon as it is no longer necessary to store it. Remember, data can have an impact on any subsequent employment law issue. It may therefore be necessary to retain data for a longer period. Look through both digital and physical locations when you delete personal data. Also, in the folders you haven't looked through in years. Better safe than sorry.

The full employee journey

Phase one: Recruitment in the employee journey

Phase two: Pre- & onboarding in the employee journey

Phase three: Employee administration in the employee journey

Phase four: Employee development in the employee journey

Phase five: Offboarding in the employee journey