Most businesses deal with data, whether that’s collecting it for marketing, generating it through customer purchases or processing it for payroll. Without a robust data privacy culture, your business is at risk of accidental data breaches, attacks from hackers and non-compliance with GDPR regulations. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the steps you can take to create a culture of privacy that protects your business and the data that you use day-to-day.

Build Clear Policies & Processes

The first step to creating a culture of privacy is creating clear guidelines for handling, storing and sharing personal information within the organisation. Your policies should be aligned with GDPR principles to ensure compliance. 

Policies should be easily accessible to all employees so they always know where to find the most up-to-date information. Any roles that are particularly important for data privacy should have specific responsibilities so employees understand their day-to-day responsibilities. 

You should regularly review your policies to ensure that they’re up to date with changes in the law, technology or industry standards. Communicate any updates with your team as they happen. 

Lead by Example

Any change that you want to see in your business needs to be modelled from the top down. Your senior leadership needs to be displaying privacy-first behaviour if you want the rest of the business to do the same. 

A Data Protection Officer (DPO) or an internal privacy champion can help make this focus on data privacy more visible. A DPO oversees all aspects of data privacy compliance and can provide support for employees. They can be externally outsourced or an existing employee. 

Invest in GDPR Training

The most important thing you can do in creating a culture of privacy is to train and educate your staff. Data breaches often occur unintentionally because of human error, so employee awareness is crucial. 

From understanding the core GDPR concepts and data subject rights to designing with data protection in mind, there’s lots to navigate. Data Protection People’s GDPR training can be tailored to your organisation’s needs, ensuring that your team has the knowledge they need for handling customer data or having secure communications.

Strengthen Your Infrastructure & Technology

Your organisation’s infrastructure and the technology your staff use should support your privacy culture. Assess all of your tools for their security measures, data minimisation features and access controls. 

Embedding privacy into your infrastructure may be slightly harder as it involves evaluating processes and procedures, and setting up others for reporting risky practices. 

Reinforce, Monitor and Improve

Privacy culture isn’t built overnight. To keep it top-of-mind, regular training, updates on new threats and regulations and audits are key. 

Make it an ongoing conversation, rather than something to forget about. This is where those privacy champions or your DPO will come in useful. 

Create a Robust Privacy Culture with Data Protection People

Need help creating an organisation of privacy-first people? With GDPR training that’s tailored to your business’s practices, we can work with you to create a culture of privacy to be proud of. Get in touch today.