[00:00:01] How can your IG professional help during an office move or office closure?
[00:00:08] Hello. Thank you for joining us. This is what counts, a podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management. This is Lee, and in this episode I will talk about how you, as an IG professional, can help your organization successfully navigate an office move or an office closure.
[00:00:44] In case you're wondering, Maura is just fine. She's flying back home after being at a client location for the past couple of days, so I'm going to go to loan first of all, what's the difference between an office move and an office closure?
[00:01:00] Let's see. As far as an office move is concerned, I'm talking about the kind where your organization decides to move from one location to another, not the situation where you move your office from the fourth floor to the 35th floor.
[00:01:14] What are some of the reasons an organization decides to relocate to a different address? Well, cost savings would be one new area might be lower taxes, lower property value, or lower operating costs, and it may be necessary to consolidate use space more cost effectively.
[00:01:31] Expansion just the opposite. Organization may need more space to accommodate growth, better location.
[00:01:39] Maybe you're moving closer to clients, customers, partners, or other services. There may be an emerging market that your organization should capitalize on and move closer to workforce. Organization may move to find employees, especially if there's a particular technical skill that's needed.
[00:02:00] Remote workforce is great, but not all organizations are 100% behind it. So maybe you need to move.
[00:02:07] An office closure is usually the situation where your organization decides that it's no longer financially viable to keep the doors open. Unimaginable operating costs like high price for security and overhead play a huge role in the decision to close an office.
[00:02:26] We all know there are professional moving companies that can handle the bulk of the work associated with a move or a closure. What I'd like to get into is the information reduction aspect of a move or closure.
[00:02:39] These two situations may use slightly different approaches to information reduction. Let me explain. In my experience, when it comes to an office move, people in office know it's coming and they can prepare and pack their stuff. It's a good idea to take this opportunity to reduce the amount of stuff you have in and around your office. I'll give you a good rule of thumb for reducing office clutter shortly.
[00:03:03] When it comes to an office closure, this is where pockets of information are left behind because a person is most worried about the current project they're working on. They take all that material with with them and they leave a bunch of old material found in, that can be found in stray cabinets, closets, back shelves of file rooms. Those are the ones that typically go unidentified by individuals. Too many times I've seen where an office administrator is left trying to figure out what to do with material left behind, especially with an employee that's left the organization. That's another situation where an office administrator gets kind of stuck with the material.
[00:03:47] They have to figure out what to do with it. They have to figure out who was it, and they find this stuff in back closets back at the office or in some storage locker down in the basement.
[00:04:00] So what do you do? Well, here's a few assumptions. First, I'm going to assume that your organizations know, your organization knows the definition of a record.
[00:04:11] It has a records retention schedule and knows how to use the records retention schedule. If you're uncertain about any of these assumptions, we should talk. Your organization may be facing some serious risks. Well, okay, I guess I can't just dump it on you like that and leave it alone. Let me cover these things a little briefly.
[00:04:34] I'm just going to read a couple definitions, so bear with me. Records are defined as any set of data created or received as part of conducting business and maintained in support of legal, regulatory, or fiscal obligations, business transactions or operations.
[00:04:51] Records can be in any format or medium, electronic paper, spreadsheets, models, presentations, audio recordings, digital recordings, video recordings, data sets, so forth, so on. Why am I telling you this? Because not everything is a record. Copies, drafts, reference material can all be treated differently along as you document it.
[00:05:15] Okay, let's keep going. A. Records retention schedule records retention schedule is a comprehensive list of your organization's record categories indicating for each the length of time it is to be maintained and its disposition.
[00:05:30] Those items in that category, how long should they be kept and maintained?
[00:05:35] Here's the tricky thing. It is worse to have a records retention schedule that is not implemented than it is to not have a records retention schedule at all. Why?
[00:05:47] Because if you have a records retention schedule, you're supposed to be using the records retention schedule and complying with the timeframes for retention.
[00:05:57] It would be a very bad thing. That's a very legal technical term there to say to a judge, we destroyed those contract records two years ago, and the judge says, you'll have to enter your retention schedule in as evidence and you find out that your retention schedule, you know, the one that you have but not implemented, says that you should have kept those contract records ten years after the close of the contract, not two. Oops. Okay, that's enough of the scare tactics. It's important to have an implemented retention schedule period, especially because we can use it when dealing with an office move or closure. Notice how I said that the retention schedule is a comprehensive list of your organization's record categories. That's important distinction because in my opinion, you should build a retention schedule by using the functions and processes of your organization. I'm saying this because it's very hard to use a retention schedule that tries to capture each and every document ever created by your organization. Roll it up. Look at the categories, at what needs to be accomplished a function. How does it get accomplished? A process or by a process? For example, if we found a closet full of load forecasting and fuel usage documents in boxes, one might be willing to try to identify each and every pipeline, location and timeframe for each document, which could take days. Or one could understand the categories of the retention schedule and know that these are examples of supply and forecasting records that belong to volume management and at a minimum find the relevant dates to determine what to do next.
[00:07:42] I feel like I'm going a bit too far and maybe losing some folks. Let me explain why I'm telling you all this.
[00:07:48] There's a good rule of thumb to use related to cleanup or office closures, and that is one third keep, one third send to storage and one third dispose of appropriately.
[00:07:59] This is to use for records in both electronic and paper, but I'm focusing mainly on paper for this particular episode.
[00:08:06] Keep records that are needed for operational and day to day purposes. Typically these are records from the current year and one year prior send to storage records that need to be maintained for retention purposes but are not referred to more than twice a year electronically. You probably don't need to do anything here, but any hard copy records laying around should be properly boxed. Place like records together index with as much defining information as possible, titles, tags, date, authors, your name, etcetera, and staged to move to an off site storage location.
[00:08:43] Shred. That's the other. The last of the one third. Yeah. Records that are past the retention period and are not on legal hold here. You do need to do something with your electronic records. Both hard copy the ones you are boxing up and its electronic counterpart need to go into the same proverbial shredding machine.
[00:09:04] Let me explain why I went into so much detail around their tension schedule made by function processes and categories.
[00:09:11] Regarding those load forecasting and fuel usage boxes we found. If we know that the retention trigger is the end of the year and the retention timeframe is five years, timeframe is five years, we could stage this material into one of the keep, storage or shred piles.
[00:09:30] I'm not suggesting that you guess what the material is. You have to read the documents to make sure you use the correct category. But it's better than having to track down some individual at your organization every time you find a documents stacked up somewhere that are not yours and you don't know what they are right away.
[00:09:47] I mentioned drafts and reference material earlier. Well, depending on your organization, you can expand the definition of a record to include drafts and a reference material. Or you could say those two items are non records. I suggest you keep drafts and reference material out of your definition. Do not span expand the definition are things getting at all better?
[00:10:14] I'm only looking for records, so that's good. I can get rid of drafts and reference material. That's good. I'm hoping you're starting to see a path forward here. We can use everything we learned to create a checklist for people to follow when they clean out their office or when they're helping you close an abandoned office. Let's develop a simple plan.
[00:10:34] First, familiarize yourself with and your helpers with your surroundings. Next, inspect the office and determine staging areas for records and non records.
[00:10:45] Explain what your organization considers to your helpers to be a draft, reference material and a record.
[00:10:54] Then we can have people start weeding out material and place drafts and reference material together in the non records staging area and all the other records, actual records together in one staging area.
[00:11:09] Do a review of the non record staging area. Box up and get rid of those non records. Move on to the next phase, which is a deeper dive into the records staging area. Now set up smaller staging areas, but let's label them. Keep storage and shred the one third, one third, one third I told you about earlier.
[00:11:29] Explain and implement this one third approach. Anything that is a year and last year, this year and last year that goes into the keep pile. Supply and forecasting records within a five year disposition timeframe or any other record within their disposition timeframe goes into the storage pile.
[00:11:50] Accounts payable records or any other record over its retention that's past their retention timeframe goes into the shred pile. Too easy? Too simple? Maybe, but it's a good start for tackling a difficult office move or office closure challenge. Now, those storage piles, they need more work, of course, right? We have to index each one of them. Those key piles, maybe that needs organization as well. The shred pile, there needs to be a review and, and an official sign off so that items could be, records can be deleted and shredded appropriately, dispositioned appropriately. Better way to put it. So there's more work to do that here. But we're using approach to start to weed out and to take the huge challenge that's facing you and boil it down into smaller and smaller chunks of challenges, I guess, if that's the way you want to put it.
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[00:13:11] Thank you.
