Dealing with disciplinary records
If you’ve watched the new Marie Kondo series on Netflix, you’re probably aware of the dangers of clutter – and the supposedly life-changing magic of tidying up. It’s a philosophy that works well for life, where a messy home can lead to a messy mindset, and it’s equally applicable to the office. Poor records management practices, physical contracts, invoices, and other documents overloading the finite space of your work environment will have negative effects on your organisational mentality.
But managing a cluttered office isn’t the same as managing a cluttered home – where you have relatively absolute control over the things you can and can’t keep. Every business is subject to legal record retention (and record destruction) obligations, and you must keep them firmly in mind when thinking about what to hold on to, what to throw away, and what to destroy.
Here are five best practices for an office declutter.
Destroy and delete records at the end of their lifecycles
To maximise your office space, you’ll need a firm policy in place for managing confidential and personal records, and a comprehensive ‘good housekeeping’ plan for getting rid of non-critical information. This policy should cover every type of record that’s relevant to your business – whether they’re VAT records, business contracts, or health and safety documents – and take into account the regulatory requirements for retention, deletion, and destruction.
It should also account for the method of destruction: you will naturally need different processes for getting rid of paper records than you will for CDs or USB sticks, which can’t be shredded very easily. On the topic of shredding, make sure you’re doing it correctly: the aim should be to render any documents that go through the machine completely unrecoverable.
Create a document filing system
Once you’ve established what you can keep, what you can get rid of, and how to get rid of it, it’s time to think about how you can avoid the problem of a cluttered office in future. That means creating a comprehensive cataloguing system for your records: which can include unique reference codes for each document, bar codes for every box, or some other system that might better suit your purposes.
Records management technology is available to help with this: tools such as O’Neil Software can make it easy to catalogue, identify, and search files at a moment’s notice. It’s a useful tool to have for whatever your storage requirements might be – whether you’re holding documents for the purposes of compliance, need to consult certain records regularly, or are simply looking to carry out an office declutter.
Scan what you can
You don’t have to keep physical copies of every record – so don’t. Instead of wasting office space by needlessly keeping hard copies, use a scanning bureau to digitalise your most important documents.
It’s important to note that you should absolutely use a scanning bureau: a desktop scanner might seem like the cost-effective option, but digitising records in this way takes a lot of time and can place undue strain on the organisation. A purpose-build scanning bureau will allow you to digitise your records at relatively low cost.
Harness some life-changing magic…
…and tidy up. The best way to manage a cluttered office is to declutter your cleaning processes. So that means handling records, for sure, but it also means either hiring a professional cleaning service or tidying up yourself.
People don’t intentionally clutter their workspaces, just as they don’t intentionally clutter their homes: in the absence of an existing process, they simply put whatever they need to dispose of, or save for later, in a random place.
And at the start, it’s not a big deal, but before you know it, that study/work-from-home office/(wo)man cave has more or less become a holding pen for accumulated letters, unwanted Christmas presents, and assorted personal files that you effectively manage by simply shutting the door and not looking at it.
You shouldn’t let it happen at home or the office. Every ‘junk room’ is a missed opportunity – so fight clutter before it becomes a problem by tidying up.
Outsource records management
Finally, if the above sounds like a lot of work – and it is – avoid the problem of cluttered offices entirely by outsourcing your records management to a third-party provider. It’ll save time, administrative expenses, and hassle.
At Access Records Management, we’re experts in storing, destroying, and digitising your records in a safe, efficient, and compliant way. Contact our specialists to discuss your records management strategy today.
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