Roles and permissions: each person sees exactly what they need, nothing more
Role-based access control (RBAC) is the principle 4mystaff is built on: you define roles — employee, team manager, HR, admin — and each role gets exactly the permissions it needs. An employee sees only their own file; a manager sees the people on their team, per the org chart; HR sees the whole company; the admin manages configuration. Highly sensitive data (salaries, medical information) carries an extra restriction level. This “least privilege” principle reduces the risk surface — no one has access to data they don’t need for the job.
Access that follows the org chart
Permissions are tied to your structure, not set up by hand for every person. A manager’s visibility comes from the reporting lines in the org chart, so when someone moves to a different team, what their new manager can see changes with them. Access stays aligned with who actually manages whom, without a separate list to maintain.
Joiners, movers and leavers
Access has to follow the employee’s lifecycle. A new hire gets the employee role; a promotion to team lead adds visibility over the new team; when someone leaves, you deactivate the account and their access ends, while their file stays archived for the retention period you apply. Reviewing who holds which role is part of keeping the data safe.
GDPR compliance: employees’ rights, in practice
GDPR gives employees concrete rights over their data — access, rectification, portability, erasure — and the firm must be able to honour them. Keeping personnel documents in one digital file per employee makes that practical: you can see what you hold about a person, correct it, and apply your retention policy per document type. Combined with roles and permissions, this helps you show that personnel data is handled on a need-to-know basis.