Welcome back for this week’s HR Fun Fridays post, and as it’s Friday the 13th, I wanted to pick a theme that would put fear in the hearts of HR professionals everywhere… The dreaded GDPR.
(For those of you looking for actual information on the GDPR, this isn’t the post for you. Try this website for some decent, non-spoofy info.)
Although months away from being put into action, the hype around GDPR is hitting new peaks every month, as you can see from the Google Trends graph below:
If you were to give this graph a voiceover, it would probably sound a bit like this:
- October 2016: “GDPR? What’s that? I don’t care.”
- February: “Oh, this is actually a thing now. I guess I should maybe find out what’s going to happen.”
- May: “Uh oh. This is going to have quite an effect. Maybe I should find someone to give me advice or something. Or I could just google it and hope for the best?”
- September: “Oh my goodness, this is actually a thing, I am so unprepared, time is going so fast HELP ME PLEASE GOOGLE I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT’S GOING ON.”
The problem with this is that as fears rise, more fears begin to fester. Especially in a world of social media, there’s no avoiding it if everyone is freaking out over the GDPR – and if someone else is freaking out, our natural reaction is to think that we need to freak out, too.
Fear breeds fear. The more we frantically search for information on the GDPR, the more of a threat it becomes – not to mention that consultants and legal services have the opportunity to take advantage of scare-mongering tactics and convince everyone they need serious legal help (which is, of course, true in some cases but not all).
Maybe the GDPR is a little like Lord Voldemort – wizards won’t speak his name out loud, and so he becomes the epitome of all terror, when in reality he’s actually just a loser with no nose.
The best advice we could give would be do your research, take action where necessary, but keep in mind that changes don’t happen overnight – the GDPR, like all regulations, will be a process coming into place, and it might be a smoother transition to compliance than you originally think.
We’ve also written an article on the ways that HR software can help you comply with the new regulations – check it out here, and if you’d like to find out more about how Youmanage can benefit your business and help you stay compliant, head over to our product page.
