In the ever-evolving world of Human Resources regardless of the current trends and innovations one thing that is critical to keep in mind when strategizing on a new HR project is respecting employee privacy. With the introduction of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in Canada, and more recently, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), privacy has taken on a whole new level of importance within the HR world.

Today’s human capital management (HCM) systems have simplified access to employee information and made sharing employee data simpler than ever. While early HRMS systems were primarily administrator tools managed by human resource, benefits and payroll power users, today’s HCM solutions are more employee-self-service focused and are more likely deployed to the end user themselves. Today’s tools make it easy to share employee information, but care must be taken in ensuring that personal information stays personal. It is critical that you carefully consider the sensitivity of your employee data and implement policies that have taken privacy into account.

And while safeguarding employee data may seem obvious, we also need to consider employee photos as one of those sensitive pieces of data. Yet today’s systems splash employee images across various mediums with the objective of encouraging employee engagement. The PDS Vista product for example, leverages employee images across the application, for example within the main profile photo, within dialogs, while searching, on the employee directory, and within the mobile interface.

We’ve prepared a whitepaper that helps you work through some of the decision you’ll need to consider before expanding your usage of employee images within your HCM. We highly recommend that organizations document and add provisions to your employee manual to address the usage of employee images.

Click here to access the full whitepaper Navigating Employee Privacy Issues with Photos in your HCM System.

This is the first article in our latest blog series—Employee Photos in Vista. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing everything from privacy considerations to configuration to batch processing jobs, and so much more!