Privacy policy

Essential Benchmarking & Reward Solutions Limited (“EBRS”, “we”, “us”) is committed to protecting personal information in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation, the Data Protection Act 2018 and other applicable data-protection legislation.

This privacy policy explains how we collect, use, store and protect personal information when providing consultancy services, conducting surveys and research, communicating with clients and operating our website.

We may update this policy periodically. The latest version will always be available on our website. 

1. The information we collect

We collect personal information online and offline that you choose to provide us with. 
This includes information provided such as when registering on our website, contacting us, completing a survey or questionnaire. It also includes when you share personal information about your employees with us so that we can undertake reward consultancy services for you.

 It also includes when you post information on EBRS’s branded pages on third-party platforms (e.g. social media). These third-party sites may have their own privacy policies and terms and conditions which EBRS is not responsible for, so you should check these before using them. 

When you submit personal information in connection with making a payment via our website, your personal information is protected with encryption software that lets your browser automatically encrypt data before you send it. 

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website to help improve it and to provide you with a good experience when you use it. For detailed information on the cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them, see our Cookie Policy.

When EBRS conducts a survey or questionnaire, we may collect:

  • answers to survey questions;

  • general employment or demographic information, such as role group, work location, contract type, working pattern or length of service;

  • information voluntarily included in free-text responses; and

  • limited technical information generated through the survey platform.

Where a survey is described as confidential or anonymous, the survey invitation or introduction will explain the measures used to protect respondents. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, EBRS does not ask survey respondents for their name, email address or other direct identifiers.

Survey answers may nevertheless constitute personal information if an individual could be identified from a combination of their answers or from distinctive information included in a free-text response.

2. The lawful bases for processing your personal information

We process personal information only where we have a lawful basis for doing so. Depending on the circumstances, our lawful bases may include:

  • Legitimate interests: to provide consultancy, research and survey services; manage our client relationships; respond to enquiries; maintain appropriate business records; and improve our services. Where a client has commissioned research, these may include the legitimate interests of both EBRS and the client in understanding workforce experiences and informing organisational decisions.

  • Contract: where processing is necessary to enter into or perform a contract.

  • Legal obligation: where we are required to retain, disclose or otherwise process information to comply with the law.

  • Consent: where we have specifically asked for consent, for example for particular types of marketing communication or where consent is the appropriate basis for a particular activity.

Where a survey intentionally collects special-category information, the survey-specific privacy information will explain the relevant additional legal condition relied upon.

We will only use personal information for the purposes for which it was collected unless we reasonably consider that another use is compatible with the original purpose or the law permits or requires that use.

3. The uses we make of this information

We will use the information we receive from you to:

  • provide you with reward consultancy services.

  • to communicate with you about our services.

  • to notify you about changes to our services.

  • to evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns.

  • to measure the amount of traffic to our website.

  • to respond to your queries and requests and manage transactions.

  • to analyse and aggregate any responses you provide to surveys that we run.

4. Disclosure of your information

We do not sell personal information or provide it to third parties for their own marketing purposes.

We may use carefully selected service providers to support our work, including survey platform, secure cloud storage, email, website, IT support and professional advisory providers. These organisations may process personal information only for the agreed purpose and subject to appropriate contractual and security requirements.

EBRS currently uses SurveyMonkey to administer certain surveys and questionnaires. SurveyMonkey processes survey information on our behalf in accordance with its terms and data processing agreement.

Where EBRS conducts a survey for a client, the survey introduction will explain what information the client will receive. Unless respondents are told otherwise, EBRS will normally provide clients with aggregated findings rather than identifiable individual responses. We may suppress or combine results for small groups where reporting them could create an unreasonable risk of identification.

We may also disclose information where required or permitted by law, including to courts, regulators, law enforcement bodies and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

5. Links from our website 

Our website contains links to other websites. Please be aware that we are not responsible or liable for the privacy practices of other websites. We encourage you to be aware when you leave our website and to read the privacy policies of other websites that collect personally identifiable information.

6. Keeping your data secure

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed.

In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

While we will use all reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal data, you acknowledge that the use of the internet is not entirely secure and for this reason, we cannot guarantee the security or integrity of any personal data that are transferred via the internet. If you have any particular concerns about your information, please contact us (see our contact details below).
 
We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.

7. Transfers of information out of the EEA 

Some of our service providers may store or process personal information outside the United Kingdom.

Where personal information is transferred to a country that has not been recognised as providing an adequate level of protection, we ensure that an appropriate UK transfer mechanism is used. This may include the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or another safeguard permitted under UK data-protection law.

Further information about the safeguards applying to a particular service or survey is available by contacting admin@ebrs.co.uk.

8. Retention periods

We will only retain your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. 
 
To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.  

In some circumstances, we may anonymise your personal information so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you. Once you are no longer our customer, we will retain and securely destroy your personal information in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.

Survey responses that contain personal information, or that could potentially identify an individual, will normally be retained for no longer than six months following delivery of the final project report. They will then be securely deleted or anonymised unless a longer period is required by law or has been clearly explained to respondents.

Anonymised and aggregated survey information that can no longer be associated with an individual may be retained for historical analysis, research and comparison purposes.

9. Your rights

Under certain circumstances, by law, you have the right to:

  1. Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a confirmation from us as to whether we process any of your personal information or not, and if this is the case, to receive a copy of such personal information and to check that we are lawfully processing it. 

  2. Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.

  3. Request erasure of your personal information (often referred to as “the right to be forgotten”). This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).

  4. Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground.  

  5. Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example, if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it, or if we no longer need your data for our legitimate interests but we need to hold some of it for the purpose of legal proceedings.

  6. Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.

If you would like to exercise any of the above rights, please email or write to us (see our contact details below) with the details of your request, for example by specifying the personal data you want to access, the information that is incorrect and the information with which it should be replaced.

Where a survey has been configured not to collect names, email addresses, IP addresses or other identifiers, EBRS may be unable to identify a particular respondent after their response has been submitted. This may mean that we cannot locate, amend or delete an individual response in response to a rights request. We will explain this where relevant and will still respond to all requests in accordance with applicable data-protection law.

10. Data controller

Essential Benchmarking & Reward Solutions Limited is the data controller for the personal information covered by this policy.

Our ICO data protection registration number is Z2053249.

Karl Ellis, Director, is EBRS’s data protection contact.

11. Contacting us  

If you have a question about this policy, how we use your personal information or wish to exercise a data protection right, please contact us by e-mail at admin@ebrs.co.uk

If you have a concern, please contact us first so that we have an opportunity to investigate it. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office: