Some data is sacred

Jo Faragher

As technology becomes more sophisticated, employers are coming up with ever more innovative ways to keep in touch with their employees. But are the lines becoming blurred between helping productivity and controlling aspects of their lives?

We’ve already heard stories about employers such as Facebook and Apple offering to freeze eggs for employees so they can delay having babies, and earlier this year the BBC reported on a company in Sweden that is injecting microchips under staff’s skin so they can enter offices and even pay for their lunch.

Now the Astellas Innovation Debate has found that a quarter of UK businesses would be prepared to extend health screening into genetic testing as they strive to retain and attract top talent. Around the same proportion would offer employees a complete readout of their genetic blueprint, providing them with an insight into their current and future health.

But as Baroness Helena Kennedy puts it, “knowing the facts about our genes can also bring challenges” – and this is arguably an understatement. With such wide-ranging information on potential (perhaps yet undiagnosed or not even presenting) health conditions, individuals could face difficulties acquiring insurance and on an organisational level, premiums could also shoot up.

From an ethical perspective, what would genetic testing truly mean for workforce planning? On the face of it, employers may argue that it will help them retain the best talent, but does it make them unconsciously selective of certain people? Will they be put off recruiting people with a history of certain conditions, or force potential candidates to go through screening before they can be considered for a role?

Not surprisingly, the fear of legal repercussions put around three-quarters of the organisations in the survey off genetic screening – although almost half said they might reconsider this view in the future if there was legislation in place to protect employers and their staff.

On the one hand, we have more access to data than ever to help shape the workforce, and this can be a positive thing. We can improve how we respond to candidates and the speed we get back to them, we can see which profiles of people work best in certain roles, or where we’re not diverse enough in our attraction practices.

But it’s the type of data held on employees and candidates that’s at question here. If the march towards collecting every snippet of information about everyone continues, do we all just become public property or a line of data in an employer database?