Using WhatsApp for work: what your crew should be told

What changes when a work number is in the chat

Your crew already run the job on WhatsApp. What changes when one of the numbers in that conversation belongs to a business is not the app and not the habit. It is that the messages become part of a work record: kept for a while, readable by people who were not in the chat, and capable of being produced later when somebody asks what happened on a Tuesday.

That is not a reason to avoid it. Paper does the same thing, badly. It is a reason to say out loud what is happening, because the failure everybody regrets is the worker who finds out months later that a message he sent was kept, and who then does not trust anything else he is told.

The ICO’s guidance for employers on monitoring workers puts the test simply enough: people should not be surprised. Being told beforehand, in plain words, is most of what that takes.

Before the number goes in

The first rule is not a data protection rule, it is Meta’s. A business may only message somebody on WhatsApp who has agreed to be contacted there. The firm is the one who gets that agreement, and it has to exist before the number is put into any system, this one included. Nobody else can give it on the worker’s behalf, and a number copied off a subcontractor’s list is not an agreement.

In practice that is a thirty second conversation at the gate, done by the person who signs the man on. It is also the only step in the whole thing that cannot be fixed afterwards, so it is worth doing properly the first time.

What to tell a worker, in the words to use

Not a policy. Six sentences, said once, by the person he already takes instructions from.

• "You clock in and out by message to this number. That is the timesheet."
• "What you send to this number is kept. What you send in the lads’ group chat is not, because we cannot see it."
• "If you share your location, we work out which site you were at. We keep the site, not the map."
• "The office can see your hours and your days. So can your foreman. Nobody else on the job."
• "Write in your own language if that is easier. It is understood."
• "If you ever want to see everything we hold about you, send MY RECORD to this number and you will get it."

The third one matters more than it looks. A shared location is telemetry and never a check on anybody: it tells the system which site a phone was at, it is never treated as proof of who was holding the phone, and a share that does not match a site is accepted and flagged rather than refused.

The fourth is the one that gets asked back, so it is worth being straight about. Inside the firm it is the office and your foreman, and nobody else on the job. Outside it, the companies that carry the messages and hold the record can reach it in the course of running the thing, and anyone the firm is required by law to give it to can ask for it. Privacy names every one of them, which is the honest end of that sentence and shorter to say than to write.

What is kept, and for how long

The answer is written down in one place and it is not this page. Privacy says what is held, who it goes to and how long each thing lasts, and what this means for your crew says the same in the words to use with a worker. Both are kept in step with the product rather than written once and left, which is why this guide points at them instead of repeating them.

Two points are worth pulling out here. The raw coordinates from a location share are not kept: what survives is the site the share resolved to, how it was worked out and how confident that was, and the coordinates themselves are erased on a timer rather than when somebody remembers. And the retention periods are the firm’s to set within limits, so the honest answer to "how long" is the one on the privacy page for the firm the worker actually works for.

What a worker can ask for, and how it is answered

A worker sends MY RECORD from the number bound to them. Before anything is put together, they answer two things: a one-time code sent to that number, and a four-digit record PIN that a foreman typed when the engagement was approved. That PIN has never travelled through the worker’s own channel in either direction, which is the point of it. Possession of a phone is not enough on its own.

It is called a verification attempt rather than an identity check, because those two answers are exactly what it tests and nothing more. Three wrong answers lock the record until a named person clears it.

The record itself is never released by the channel. It is put together, and then a named human at the firm decides to release it, because the firm is the one answerable for what it contains. Another person’s name in it is withheld rather than described, so a colleague is not identified sideways by their role.

What a reply does not prove

This is the part to read twice, because it is the part somebody will rely on in a meeting. If you send a notice out to fifty workers and forty-eight reply, what you have is evidence that the message reached forty-eight phones and that forty-eight replies came back. That is distribution.

It is not evidence that anybody was briefed, that anybody read it, that anybody understood it, or that the man who replied was the man holding the phone. A toolbox talk is a toolbox talk. Anyone who tells you a reply is a briefing record is selling you something, and we will not, which is why nothing on this site describes it as one.

Where that leaves you

Tell them before the first message, not after the first question. Keep the number for work and let the group chat stay the group chat. Point anyone who asks at the two pages that answer it properly, and answer MY RECORD when it comes.

The rest of it is the ordinary business of running a job by message: timesheets from the WhatsApp your crew already use, and, for a gang that does not all read English, multilingual crew.

About this guide

This guide reads the ICO guidance for employers as at 7 September 2026, on monitoring workers and in its wider employment practices guidance, together with the GOV.UK data protection pages. It is written for trade subcontractors and it is not legal advice. If you are monitoring workers in ways this guide does not describe, take advice. None of those three pages carries a version number, so the date is the day they were read, and it moves when they are read again.