ICO consultation on the draft employment practices: monitoring at work guidance and draft impact assessment

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is producing topic-specific guidance on employment practices and data protection. We are releasing our drafts of the different topic areas in stages and adding to the resource over time. A draft of the guidance on monitoring at work is now out for public consultation.

The draft guidance aims to provide practical guidance about monitoring workers in accordance with data protection legislation and to promote good practice.

Before drafting the guidance, the ICO issued a call for views between August and October 2021. This sought input from relevant stakeholders including:

• employers;
• professional associations;
• those representing the interests of staff;
• recruitment agencies;
• employment dispute resolution bodies;
• workers;
• volunteers;
• employees; and
• suppliers of employment technology solutions.

This call for views informed our work in developing updated employment guidance. You can view a summary document of the responses on our website.

We also intend to produce additional practical tools (such as checklists) to go alongside the guidance to help support your employment practices.

We have also produced an impact scoping document. This provides a high-level outline of some potential impacts we have considered so far. We are seeking feedback on this document as well as any other insights from stakeholders. You should read this document alongside the monitoring at work consultation document. However, some of the questions may not be relevant to you or your organisation, so please skip these as necessary.

We have extended the deadline for responses on the draft guidance and draft impact assessment until 5pm on Friday 20 January 2023. The ICO welcomes feedback on the specific questions set out below.

Responding to the consultation

You can respond to this consultation by downloading the documents below and emailing your response to: [email protected].

Or print off the documents and post to:

Employment Practices Guidance Team
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

If you have any general queries about the consultation or would like further information, please email us at [email protected].

Privacy statement

For this consultation we may publish the responses received from organisations or a summary of the responses. We will not publish responses from individuals acting in a private capacity. If we do publish any responses, we will remove email addresses and telephone numbers from these responses but apart from this we will publish them in full.

Please be mindful not to share any information in your response which you would not be happy for us to make publicly available.

Should we receive an FOI request for your response we will always seek to consult with you for your views on the disclosure of this information before any decision is made.

For more information about what we do with personal data please see our privacy notice.

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