Significant workforce privacy gap still exists
Source: Middle East Insurance Review | Oct 2021
While 64% of companies believe it is important to protect employee privacy, only 34% say they are effective or very effective in doing so.
The 2021 State of Workforce Privacy & Risk Report by workforce cyber intelligence company DTEX and Ponemon Institute found that 64% of respondents say it is important or very important to protect employees’ privacy in the workforce, but only 34% of organisations are effective or very effective in doing so.
The survey also found that most organisations have a difficult time balancing workforce privacy with the growing perceptions around the need to monitor employee engagement and internal risk given the shift to remote work.
The 2021 report surveyed 1,249 IT and IT security practitioners on their organisations’ approach to securing sensitive information and reducing workforce risks.
Around two-third (64%) of the participating organisations said it is difficult to track employee activity and performance without affecting their morale or trust in the organisation. Also, 53% of companies believe their employees expect their personal behaviours and activities will remain private but less than half (47%) anonymise the employee data they collect while monitoring for security risk and operational performance.
To mitigate risk without affecting employee trust, organisations should be mindful of collecting data anonymously and minimise the amount of data being collected. According to 65% of respondents collecting more data than necessary can overtax endpoints and the network and also negatively impact employee productivity. M