If you have recently updated your personal details following the launch of the University’s new Employee Self System, then please ignore this email.
Please can all staff update their information using employee self-service (ESS). To do this you should log into ESS: https://www.hrsystems.admin.cam.ac.uk/systems/systems-overview/employee-self-service-ess If you have never logged into employee self-service before then you may need to update your UIS password. Instructions are provided on the webpage.
We would be grateful if you could update your details by the end of June. In common with all publically-funded universities and other higher education providers, we are required to send data about our staff to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) every year. Unfortunately, the information we hold about staff in a number of areas is incomplete.
If you wish to confirm that this email is genuine, please refer to the HR Division web page, which has a “Latest news” item on the need to update your details.
After you have logged in, you will see direct links to the following sections of ESS:
- Update my HESA details
- Update my sensitive information
You’ll also find a link to a user manual and FAQs to provide further assistance. Having read those, if you have any queries about how to use ESS, please contact the HR Systems Helpdesk (chris.helpdesk@admin.cam.ac.uk)
Staff information is sent to HESA annually, in an anonymised form. The information gained from across the sector is analysed and made available to the government departments and agencies that need the data to help them carry out their functions. It is also made available (with appropriate safeguards to protect anonymity) to other users.
We are obliged to ask you for sensitive information such as ethnicity. However you can decline to give it by selecting the ‘Prefer not to say’ option. As well as being used in the HESA return, sensitive information is useful to the University: for example, information on ethnicity is useful for our Race Equality Charter submission. We currently do not have ethnicity information for about 15% of our staff. This makes the information less useful for us; HESA has also asked us to improve it.
The University also holds further information about you which we do not share with HESA. This information includes your home address, contact details and emergency contact details (such as relatives). It is very important that this information is up to date in case we need to get in touch with you (or a friend or relation) in an emergency.
Full details about how your information will be used can be found on the HR Division’s website. This also contains a link to HESA’s staff data collection notice, which provides definitive information on the uses to which they put our data: https://www.hr.admin.cam.ac.uk/hr-staff/hr-data/how-we-handle-your-personal-data
If you have any questions about the data we collect or about the staff data HESA return, then please contact Simon Virr (simon.virr@admin.cam.ac.uk).