Workplace Security

The security of your workplace can affect the risk when handling confidential information. If there is user-friendly, effective security, not just rules that are impossible to enforce and not publicised, it can make a big difference to the culture of information governance.

The workplace security assessment is a survey that captures your observations on the security in place to prevent data breaches in your work areas. You need to fill the survey in once for each UCL location in which information is being handled by members of your research project. If information is being processed by another organisation, the requirement to complete this survey will be replaced by a contract which will require the third party to maintain adequate physical security.

The survey is carried out on SharePoint here. As with the other requirements, only an information asset owner or administrator should fill out the requirement. You need to fill in the survey, including a single office location and your Information Governance services reference, e.g. IG/00999. You can revisit the survey to carry out the assessment for further locations.

If another member of staff in your office has previously completed the survey then their survey response will be made available to you to confirm via Microsoft Flow. This means that you will not need to complete the full survey, just the part that relates to collection of data outside of UCL offices. However, you will need to respond to the survey that was completed previously. If the previous survey is inaccurate, in your view, then you should complete the full survey. Do not worry about creating duplicate addresses in the system.

If your survey is complete, and, for those adopting a previously completed survey to meet this requirement where one was previously carried out for their location, the earlier survey has been confirmed, notification should arrive by email that your 'Stage 4' workplace security requirement has been completed. If you have completed Stages 1-4 then you might also receive a prompt to complete Stage 5, which is to be completed after all four of the previous stages have been completed only.