London—Privacy Culture Ltd completed a unique global research project together with global law firm Dentons, Queen Mary University and Capgemini, to understand employee attitudes, knowledge and behaviour towards data privacy and protection.

3500 employees in 10 international organisations operating across 52 different countries and 4 different sectors, took part in the survey.

The survey covered 12 themes such as Governance & Accountability, Retention & Deletion, Data Security, and Data incident reporting, focusing on questions relevant to GDPR, and other global privacy standards and laws from around the world.

Respondents completed these 50 questions using the psychometric Likert scale that records employee views from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. Survey findings were then supplemented with conversational insights from individuals in different areas of the organisation to understand better why employees may not be behaving in the expected privacy-compliant way.

Participating organisations were then provided with a comprehensive report that covered the best and worst performing themes, deep insights into specific issues at both function and country level, and high-level recommendations around how to address them. Individual results were then shown against an overall benchmark of all participating companies.

It will be heartening for CISOs and DPOs alike to note that Data Incident Reporting and Governance and Accountability fared well across all industries and sectors this year. However, topics such as Risk Management and Retention and Deletion were among the areas that highlighted the need for additional awareness, education and training across the board.

The Global Privacy Culture Survey Report 2021 is unmissable reading for DPOs who are looking to understand or validate where to focus their training efforts and close skills gaps. It includes findings and observations by theme, sector, geography, and function around the privacy practices and sentiments of employees.

This report provides crucial insights into how privacy is evolving and maturing moving forward, and this is why these benchmark results will be published annually for the next 10 years, to allow the tracking of attitudes and patterns of behaviour over time.

Nick Graham, Partner at Dentons says: 'This report takes a fresh look at privacy compliance by exploring how privacy is working from an individual perspective within organisations. Don’t lose sight of these "people insights"; they are key to assessing success of your frameworks and controls.'

Steve Wright, Chief Executive Officer at Privacy Culture, said: 'As organisations become lean, agile and responsive to economic and pandemic demands organisations must evaluate why data privacy is struggling to land within their organisation.

'They must ensure that the levels of data privacy training and awareness are fit for purpose for all staff and especially in those roles that are involved with data processing activities. 'More importantly, they need to know what can be done to identify privacy risks, reduce the likelihood of them materialising, and how to embed and operationalise privacy within core business functions.'

To find out more about the survey click here.

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