During the last Victorian state election, I was working in information management for a state government department, when our team received a visit from a colleague wielding a USB stick... full of cabinet-in-confidence (CiC) information.... going back 10 years!!  Seriously. You can imagine what we were thinking and you can imagine our reaction ‘You should know better than that! Why didn’t you use the department’s EDRMS for this information?’…and so on.

Our visitor just kept on nodding at various intervals until we ran out of steam and he walked off, minus one USB stick. Obviously much wiser now and likely never to repeat his offence.

Fast forward to just a few months ago. I walked into a bombsite - more commonly known as my teenage daughter’s bedroom. It was a typical scene in front of me. Clothes all over the floor, dirty dishes stacked on her desk and rubbish everywhere. Of course, my immediate reaction was to voice my issues with the situation. ‘Do you know how much that school blazer cost? I’ve told you before there’s a no eating rule upstairs, and didn’t I raise you to put your rubbish in the bin?!’

But this time, instead of seeing someone nod their head in agreement and walk off, with me assuming my point had been made, I had to live with the perpetrator and I actually got to see the behaviour change. There was none. The room was in exactly the same state the next day (actually there may have been an additional dirty plate), and not only that, but relations between us were strained. Obviously not the result I was after. 

It made me think back to our secret USB stick man from years ago. Rather than going back to his desk and diligently starting to use the EDRMS for CiC information, I started to think that maybe the truth was that he had just replaced his USB stick with his local drive.  And now he’s telling no one about his secret stash of CiC documents (not least because of the reaction he received last time). I had an uncomfortable feeling that whilst our words may have informed him of his obligations, perhaps they had no impact on his care factor, and thus no impact on his behaviour.

My job now is to identify records management and process issues, develop effective solutions and implement them. So usually when I am faced with an issue I haven’t seen before, I turn to literature to give me a starting point. So that’s what I did with my daughter. 

Enter Dr. Michael Carr-Gregg and his book The Princess B**chface Syndrome (there’s a really good reason for the title).  I was looking for the best strategy to make my daughter listen to me and see how important tidiness was, see the benefits, care about it as much as I do; change her behaviour.

Well, it gave me a strategy, but not the one I was after. Dr Carr-Gregg’s main premise was that I had to change my behaviour, not my daughter. What?! But I’m the adult. I’m older. I should know better ... and so on. 

I’m the records manager, I’ve been doing it for 15 years, and people should listen to me because I have the qualifications, lots of knowledge and experience and I can talk about it ad nauseum. People should care about what I care about because I am the expert and a very caring person!

See what I mean? Just because your organisation knows what their obligations are, just because you’ve sent out very informative communications about security, just because you have a wiz bang EDRMS, doesn’t mean that they will care about recordkeeping or god forbid, records management. They don’t. They won’t. They’ll keep on eating in their room.

Unless… we as records managers change our behaviour. Unless we make it not about RM, but what they care about. The what’s in it for them. 

I was reading a Doculabs blog the other day, about how hard it is to be a Records manager (agree!). Whilst it was a good article, a response posted by Chris Walker was even better and summed up everything I’ve ever thought about how we sell RM - ‘People don’t care about RM; they care about…the value and power of information. RM is a means to an end, not the end itself. Until RM’s understand this and transition…it’s still same ol’ same ol’.

So Obi-Wan-Kenobe (a.k.a. Dr Carr-Gregg) you’re my only hope. How do I change the way I interact with my organisation? How do I start not talking records management? How do I start talking about the things they care about?

Empathise

And not just say you understand. Really try walking around in their shoes. Ask to spend half a day with the finance people. See that they really just work in multi-layered spreadsheets that spit out numbers that they then feed into number crunching applications. That at the end of the day, they need a play space to do this work, and at significant points in the process, create a key report that would benefit from being saved in a corporate records area. Understand that they really can’t see the point of an EDRMS because 95% of their work does not create records as such. So acknowledge it. Agree that they have an exception space on the network shared drive where they have their applications and linked spreadsheets. Work with IT to get the applications linked to your EDRMS, and when a report is created, it’s auto-saved straight into your EDRMS and even better, a workflow sends a notification to managers to read and approve it. 

Dialogue

Have you ever noticed that really important conversations come out of nowhere? Some of the best talks I’ve had with my daughter are when we are in the car driving somewhere. Open up the avenue for dialogue, and you’ll be surprised at what comes to you. Take every opportunity to spread the records management message. If you start to listen to what the organisation cares about, you can put a records management spin on it and ta-da! You are suddenly talking about something the organisation cares about. People start to listen. 

Start saying hi to the HR people in the lift. Listen when they complain about so much paperwork. Talk about a time when you helped the HR department in your previous role. Talk about being the Treasurer of your son’s soccer team and how you protect the team from fraud with good recordkeeping. Just talk! People will start to know who you are, what you do, and how you can actually help with practical solutions, not just ‘records management’. Instead of being the person who ‘deals with records or something’, you are the person ‘who really helped me with a problem I had last month with our invoices’. 

A good idea is to keep an eye on your organisation’s latest initiatives. They want to reduce costs? You can help with that - maybe with a review of your hardcopy records and network drive. Just deleting The Office seasons 1-5 will get rid of a couple of gigabyte of storage. (As a side note here, I project managed the shutdown of a government department’s network drive to read only. Out of the movies, TV series and Podcasts we found, the greatest proportion of them was Ricky Gervais productions. Ricky, you have a lot to answer for). 

So the organisation’s aim this year is to engage with their customers better? You can help with that. A knowledge hub on SharePoint (hmm, a whole other article there…) with all customer surveys and information, along with an internal blog for customer initiatives can do that. You can even lead the project – in cooperation with the IT department. Don’t shoot the messenger. Yes, I know, our team needs to apologise to the secret squirrel USB stick man (I’d like to think we learnt our lesson). When people come to you with an issue or better yet, a solution to an issue, don’t blame them for creating the issue. Don’t shut their ideas down because they won’t work. Talk to them and ask them questions about the root of the problem. Why are you eating in your room? Oh, you use food as a reward for studying for half an hour. Good idea. Perhaps we’ll have to renegotiate that rule. And when a USB stick man knocks on your door, acknowledge he’s made the right step in coming to you for help in the first place. You may even be so lucky to have someone come to you asking for help with a solution they want to implement. In my experience it generally is a pretty poor solution, with a lot of RM holes. But hey, they came! 

One time we had a team coming to us to ask for help with updating a document type they were using. There were a lot of unused metadata fields they wanted removed, and they wanted to add others. The communications manager and I met with the team, eager to see their ideas. Removal of about three or four non-mandatory fields, great. Tick. Addition of more than ten new fields – all of them mandatory. Not so great. The communciations manager and I looked at each other. ‘Nup, ‘aint gonna work’ was what that look said. But what we said out loud was ‘that seems a little bit complicated for you – let’s see how we can make it as simple as possible whilst still getting the information you need’…and so it went from there. The final solution was nothing like they’d come to us with, but both teams were happy with the outcome. 

So on the way back from the gym a few weeks ago my daughter and I get to talking about her room. Doesn’t she care that it’s a mess? Well yes, but there is so much else going on in her life, having a messy room is very low down on her priority list. I can now see her point. She studies 2-3hrs a night, she plays a lot of sport, she has a better social life than I do, and she cooks dinner for the family during the week. But the untidiness in her room is affecting her studies – she has to study on the bed because the desk is so messy. Yes, that is something she cares about. So let’s compromise. We’ll leave the rest of the room for now (I still cringe when I see the school blazer kicked under the bed), but let’s focus on getting the desk tidy. I’m hoping that once she experiences the benefits of having a tidy desk it might spill over to other areas of her room. 

Likewise in our organisations, if we take the time to understand our business – and I mean really understand it, if we show ourselves to be business savy, not records managers who sit in basements cataloguing old documents, and if we offer practical support to our organisations, maybe, just maybe, we could start getting some good RM practices embedded. I’m not promising that a fantastic retention and disposal schedule will light up the world, but if it starts saving the organisation money, and if it reduces the load on IT systems, then our people will care. 

So how is the bombsite these days? Well if I tell you that my daughter is sitting next to me now at the kitchen bench because, to use her words, her desk is ‘ummmm full’, then maybe not so good. But ever the optimist, I think there is a little ray of hope.  The last time I was in there all the rubbish was in a big plastic bag. I picked it up, thanked my daughter for being so organised, and took it out to the bin.

I did not ask how long it had been there. 

Kate Fuelling is General Manager and Principal Consultant of One Umbrella Consulting. She is a records management specialist with qualifications in business, project management, training and process improvement.  Her approach focuses on creating practical records management solutions for clients whilst achieving cost and process improvement benefits. Kate’s extensive career has spanned the UK and Australia in the retail, corporate, government and non-for-profit sectors. She is currently reading The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook and Surviving Year 12 and can thoroughly recommend both. Emaile her at kfuelling@oneumbrella.com.au