The importance of safeguarding employee data is not a new imperative, but I think there are reasons to believe it should be given much greater importance. With the rise of talent analytics, companies are collecting increasing quantities of information about their employees, and perhaps even more important is that the predictive power of this information is increasing as well.
As we continue to learn more about the scientific linkages between behavior, brain and body, the fact is that information collected about any one member of this triad has the potential to reveal much about the others. For example, measurements about a healthy person's gait while walking is now linked to the later onset of Alzheimer's disease. Several startup companies working with scientists are developing simple games that are thought to implicitly measure various cognitive abilities and personality traits.
Why does this matter? Companies are using increasingly sophisticated types of cognitive, emotional and social assessments of their employees with the objective of using advanced analytics to link these measures to performance. As both the scientific understanding of human behavior and the use of talent analytics advances, employee data collected and maintained by companies will become ever more predictive and revealing. This data in the wrong hands has the potential to ruin careers and lives, and companies have an obligation to take the effort required to safeguard it.
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