Employee Digital Rights are Fundamental

By Cliff Stevenson, Principal Analyst, Talent Management and Workforce Management

Employee digital rights are in the news and have a been a hot topic in HR circles lately. Not understanding or respecting employee digital rights can result in real-world consequences, as anyone who understands the term “GDPR” can tell you. And it’s not just GDPR. In fact, GDPR might be more of a symptom than a cause for employee digital-rights concerns.

There’s growing interest in breaking up the big social media giants; multiple states implemented employee digital rights legislation; and there is growing public distrust in how their data is being collected and what it is being used for.

I would argue that this concern is a positive thing! People should be concerned about how, what, where and why their personal data is collected in all aspects of their life and they have a right to know that information. However, I also believe that honest companies, acting in good faith, can use that data to create a more humanistic, hospitable and healthy work environment for their employees.

It’s often a scare tactic to say the machines are coming for our jobs, though in many cases, they are. But it’s the jobs nobody should have in the first place: converting paper documents to digital files, moving info from one database to another, assigning numerical values to bubbled-in answers on an application. Nobody should want or have those jobs. Instead, let’s allow the machines to do the kind of work they do best: mindless, thankless, uncurious drudgery. Let humans do what we uniquely do: listen, act with a sense of fairness, relate and empathize.

One way or another, software will eventually take on these roles. We just have to make sure we understand how to create a more human-centric process to ensure we control the data resulting from those actions. That’s employee digital rights in a nutshell: being transparent, taking ownership and enabling the data we collect to be used to make us more human, not less.

Join us on May 22nd when I’ll be discussing this issue from my perspective (research and data) and from a business case, real-world application-side with my co-host, Andrea Palumbo. And don’t be afraid to ask us what you need to know. It’s your right, after all.

To sign up for the free webinar, Employee Digital Rights: Ensuring Engagement and Compliance, click here

Cliff Stevenson, (Twitter: @CliffordDarrell email: [email protected]) Principal Analyst, Talent Management and Workforce Management, Brandon Hall Group

For more information on Brandon Hall Group’s research, please visit www.brandonhall.com

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Chief Executive Officer of Brandon Hall Group Mike Cooke Prior to joining Brandon Hall Group, Mike Cooke was the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of AC Growth. Mike held leadership and executive positions for the majority of his career, at which he was responsible for steering sales and marketing teams to drive results and profitability. His background includes more than 15 years of experience in sales, marketing, management, and operations in the research, consulting, software and technology industries. Mike has extensive experience in sales, marketing and management having worked for several early high-growth emerging businesses and has implemented technology systems to support various critical sales, finance, marketing and client service functions. He is especially skilled in organizing the sales and service strategy to fully support a company’s growth strategy. The concept of growth was an absolute to Mike and a motivator in starting AC Growth, in order to help organizations achieve research driven results. Most recently, Mike was the VP and General Manager of Field Operations at Bersin & Associates, a global analyst and consulting services firm focused on all areas of enterprise learning, talent management and talent acquisition. Tasked with leading the company’s global expansion, Mike led all sales operations worldwide. During Mike’s tenure, the company has grown into a multi-national firm, conducting business in over 45 countries with over 4,500 multi-national organizations. Mike started his career at MicroVideo Learning Systems in 1992, eventually holding a senior management position and leading all corporate sales before founding Dynamic Minds. Mike was CEO and Co-Founder of Dynamic Minds, a custom developer of software programs, working with clients like Goldman Sachs, Prentice Hall, McGraw Hill and Merrill Lynch. Also, Mike worked for Oddcast, a leading provider of customer experience and marketing solutions, where he held a senior management position leading the company into new markets across various industries. Mike also serves on the Advisory Board for Carbon Solutions America, an independent sustainability consulting and carbon management firm that specializes in the design and implementation of greenhouse reduction and sustainability plans as well as managing the generation of carbon and renewal energy and energy efficiency credits. Mike attended University of Phoenix, studying Business Administration and Finance. He has also completed executive training at the Chicago Graduate School of Business in Chicago, IL.

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