Right to request stored infofmation

Thanks James and Emma
As HR, I check weekly and ensure the notes are factual, and that the individual is told at the time that an issue is being recorded. We do try to be as transparent as possible, and to be truthful, it is a minority of people who have asked to see what has been written about them. Funnily enough, the majority asking are those that do not have anything on the spreadsheet, and they have been advised as such.
As to your last point Emma, we do record what remedial action has been taken and any comments the individual made at the time.

Thanks for all the help guys

I had a thought - why not use this situation to review how you manage this process as a whole.

You could make the employees aware that this record is being made, and when the supervisor/team leader has noticed a thing that would need to go on the record they can discuss it with the employee, add it to the log in their presence or with their knowledge - as you say, you can use it to identify extra training needs.

It could be a very valuable bargaining tool with your union if you are open and transparent about the record, and if you engage the staff at the point of adding the entry you are likely to avoid requests because they all know what's on there already.

I would also suggest recording when a problem has been fixed and the employee has improved.

And as James says, keep it purely factual.

Gareth,

It might be worth ensuring that all managers who may populate this incident log remain factual and not opinionated.

In honesty, it does seem like a good management tool, especially for your sort of environment.

Requests to view it certainly shouldn't be "people queueing up" - it should be the provision of the extracts. Note also that the employee have the right to request any incorrect information is updated. If Barry wasn't wearing safety glasses on 3rd June, all he needs to say is "prove it" and unless you have CCTV that old, you will (on the face of it) have to delete that entry.

Thanks Emma, appreciate your help with this.

You say "We can provide the information to individuals confidentially, but should we have to? Do individuals have the right to see every e-mail their name is mentioned on? every note in a team leaders diary/notebook? transcript of every meeting where their name is mentioned? I don't think so, so whats the difference?"

You ask "Should" you have to provide the information, but the question really is DO you have to, and to answer that you need to look at the Data Protection Act, Subject Access Requests and how they apply to an individual and an organisation.

The general principle is that organistions must disclose information held about an individual to that person if they ask for it. There are some caveats on this - for example you ask whether they can see every email that mentions their name - it depends on the context and whether the information is materially about them as a person.

If the email/meeting notes etc are materially about the person they have a right to see it.

If it's just a record that they were in attendance then it is possible that it isn't about them and may not be covered by the Act.

A spreadsheet such as you describe obviously contains information about them as a person and I would suggest would be caught by the Act, and an employee would have the right to see it as it contains information directly connected to them.

I'd really recommend that you look at the ICO website to get an idea of what is or is not covered, it's a very good site, full of useful guidance, I find it invaluable and I deal with the Data Protection Act as part of my work.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection.aspx

The spreadsheet is more of a communication tool between team leaders/departments/shifts than any form of performance monitoring.

For example, an employee is seen working without safety glasses on (a rule we have due to the nature of the job). The team leader speaks to him informally about this. However, a few days later, the same individual is seen again without safety glasses, on a different shift by a different team leader. Without this communication tool, the informal action taken would not be known by the 2nd team leader who may then have another informal chat, oblivious to the fact that the individual has been spoken to on a prior occasion, and could in fact have been spoken to on several occasions by several team leaders about the same thing.
It is not feasible for a team leader to send an e-mail to every other team leader every time he speaks to someone about everything that happens. So a note is put on the spreadsheet. If a team leader then identifies an issue, be it conduct, performance, training or whatever, he can quickly identify if this issue has cropped up before or if it is just an isolated incident. A decision can then be made as to the appropriate course of action - informal chat, formal discipline, training.....
We can provide the information to individuals confidentially, but should we have to? Do individuals have the right to see every e-mail their name is mentioned on? every note in a team leaders diary/notebook? transcript of every meeting where their name is mentioned? I don't think so, so whats the difference?

Hi Gareth,

Could you not have a folder on your system which contains a spreadsheet for each employee. That way issues could still be recorded and each manager would still have access. This way though if an employee wants access to his/her own data then it won't mean any redacting or editing of other peoples data. Wou8ld each speadsheet file not constitute an indicidual performance review sheet?

In my view conduct factors into a performance review. I would consider my permance at work to cover anything that I do at work which may possibly affect other peoiple or my work.

If you factor in a charge for unreasonable requests for access then you should cut down on excessive requests.

Thanks Martin
I don't think recording on individual performance review sheets would do what we want. If, for example, someone on the night shift spoils an item due to a manufacturing error, and when they are on the day shift, does the same thing, the team leader on the day shift needs to identify that this is not an isolated incident. The idea of the spreadsheet is so that different team leaders, in different departments, on different shifts, have easy access to information. By recording this on individual performance review sheets, the information may not be accessible to the different teamleaders, in different departments, on different shifts. in addition, the issues may not be performance related, but could be conduct related.

This information should be recorded on an individual perfomance review sheet, then this would not be an issue.

To collect data on a group in such a way will always cause problems. All tohse concerned are entitled to see what is on record about their personal performance.

They are entitled to request copies and irrelevent data must be redacted (removed or blacked out). There are strict time scales on producing thisi nformation and it can be charged for by the employer.

See the ICO website for details on how this can be done.

As we have a number of Team Leaders running different sections and shifts, we set up a spreadsheet where Team Leaders could record informal discussions with employees, in order to identify things like training requirements, repeat occurences of conduct issues etc. For example, if an employee makes a mistake while working in one section, the Team Leader could check if there has been a similar issue when the employee was working for a different Team Leader, thus identifying a problem which may require some additional training. If an employee is spoken informally about something by one Team Leader, and repeats the same "offence" while on another shift with a different Team Leader, the 2nd Team Leadercan refer to the spreadsheet and point out that the employee has already been spoken to about this before. The union have now asked if everyone has the right to view this information. We don't want everyone queuing up on a daily basis to look at the information, but are concerned that they may have a right to view this. Can anyone offer advice on this?