You may have heard of the POPI Act, but don’t really know what it stands for or entails. Well the POPI Act is more than just a catchy name – it is a super important thing for all companies to comply to – let’s find out why.
The Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act was set in place for the purpose of protecting an individual’s personal details, in order to prevent people from just sharing their information all over the place without their consent.
An individual’s personal details are seen as ‘precious goods’ that they have every right to protect – nobody wants their cellphone number or address thrown around all willy nilly right?
The act was signed into law in November of 2013 according to the South African constitutional right to privacy as seen in section 14 of our Constitution. The POPI Act will be implemented on a more serious note from 2018, but for now, we would like to stipulate the importance of becoming POPI compliant in the future.
There are a few steps that a company needs to take in order to effectively and securely store an individual’s information. We list these below:
Have we mentioned before how cool OnRamp is? We’re so cool, we even offer help with POPI training. It’s as easy as boiling an egg. You can simply create a training PlayBook around POPI best practices, upload it to your OnRamp portal and send it on to all your staff for them to learn and complete a test. You can view our PlayBook on more POPI information on your portal once you are logged in. If you want to create a series of PlayBooks on how to look after customer information, you can do this too. Some PlayBook subjects could be:
And in case you were wondering, OnRamp is POPI compliant, with each of our customers information securely stored and free from those sneaky little hackers. We take the utmost care in safely storing any private information that you give us and we promise not to sell it on the call-centre market 🙂
If you are still stuck with how to go about being more POPI compliant, drop us a line on info@onramp.co.za.
You can also read more the POPI Act over here: https://www.workpool.co/featured/popi/
Last month, we chatted about empowering your staff in the workplace, by offering them training options to better themselves and your business as a whole (if you missed it, you can read this article here). We agree that training your staff is a pretty cool thing to do right? Now, what if training your staff meant a higher BEE score? Well, it does, and it’s a great thing to strive for. Let’s have a look at how this can be achieved.
Well, let’s start by saying what it’s not. It’s not one of those annoying little things that fly around, ready to sting you at any moment that you bother it. Although, the lack of BEE in your company can leave somewhat of a sting if you are not complying with the correct BEE codes.
Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) or broad-based black economic empowerment (B-BBEE) as it is more technically known, was implemented as a means to right the wrongs of Apartheid, by giving previously disadvantaged groups in South Africa, economic privileges that were once not available to them. In other words – providing them with jobs in the workplace that would previously have been given to the advantaged in South Africa.
Let’s just say, that having a high ranking score on the BEE compliance ranking is more beneficial to your business in South Africa than having Bill Gate as your CEO. It is crucial for South African businesses, in order for the country to integrate its people and grow the economy.
For each individual business, being BEE compliant will help with getting bigger and better contracts; it provides credibility for the company – thus making you outshine your competitors; it helps to develop lasting business relationships and it forces you to upskill your employees, which is beneficial for the company.
Skills Development is seen as a priority element under the Revised Codes of Good Practice with the BEE gods. Upskilling employees benefits your business in that it helps to keep your staff for a longer period of time; training as a benefit will assist in recruiting new staff and it helps to make you more competitive as a company.
Besides these facts, skills development will help your company to earn more B-BBEE points as skills development earns 20 points on the BEE scorecard as opposed to 15 points for other developments. Companies can also claim up to 40% back on any staff training costs – that’s a great incentive!
So we’ve seen how important it is to train staff for BEE purposes, but how and where do we do it effectively? The important thing in this instance is being able to capture your training in one place, so it can be easily submitted for your BEE audit. Online training has become a popular way to train staff, because of its flexibility and easy access (read more about online training, here). It also makes it really easily accessible for reporting on what training has been done – especially when done in one central hub.
With OnRamp training, all your information is stored in one place, online. We will be releasing a new feature next month, which has been created particularly to log any external training activities, for ease of use when submitting your BEE audit. Pretty cool of us right?
The important thing to realise when training your staff is that you are essentially paving your own future for the company and providing a means for better business on all accounts.