Is the Legal Department the Real Reason Employees Ignore Document Deletion Rules?

Legal operations teams face a big problem: Employees save everything forever, ignoring document retention and deletion policies. Do employees really need to save the email from seven years ago about there being cake in the break room? Over-retention increases cost and risk in eDiscovery, raises risks of data breaches, and increases storage costs. Additionally, important information like contracts get lost in the clutter.

Employees’ habit of blowing off document deletion rules is frustrating for legal teams, whose instinctive response is to blame the employees. “They need to follow the rules!” “We need consequences for employees who don’t.” “We need a company-wide data deletion project.” IT is also very receptive to these messages, as they see information repositories filling up. The focus becomes on correcting “misbehaving” employees.

It’s time for some tough love. The problem may not be your employees. The problem may be you. The root cause of employees saving everything forever is often poor policies, burdensome processes, and poorly designed information repositories. Legal operations professionals and larger records teams should start by looking inward.

Is your records retention policy too narrow?

Traditional records retention schedules are based exclusively on legal and regulatory requirements. This is too narrow. The problem is that there is a large amount of needed and useful information that is not subject to these legal requirements, yet should also be retained. This includes processes, intellectual property, and reference information.

For example, take marketing plans. For most industries, there is no legal requirement for retaining these plans, but if you are in marketing and need to develop a new marketing plan, it is certainly helpful to use the last one as a starting point. This information has business value; it is needed to run the business. Marketing employees are probably going to thwart efforts to delete the older marketing plan.

And if employees start ignoring the records retention policy for some things, they soon ignore it for everything. Thus, “save everything, forever” habits are born.

Records retention schedules should be broader, defining records based on legal and regulatory requirements as well as on business value. This doesn’t mean saving everything forever. Rather, it means defining reasonable retention for high-value information, even if there is no underlying legal and regulatory requirement. This balanced approach actually drives less retention.

Does your retention process follow the five-second rule?

Another frequent problem is overly burdensome classification processes.

Employees receive roughly 167 emails and create dozens of files each day. Even a one-minute classification process will consume hours every week. In reality, employees will spend, at most, about five seconds deciding where to store a document. If the process takes longer, even well-meaning users will eventually ignore it. And if information is never properly classified, it becomes extremely difficult or risky to delete it.

Many companies are now designing classification processes around the “five-second rule:” The entire process for identifying, classifying, moving, and tagging information as records cannot take longer than five seconds.

Beware of the “taxonomy trap”

Legal and IT teams often invest enormous effort in designing complicated file structures and taxonomies. These structures may look beautiful from an enterprise content management perspective, but they frequently overwhelm the people who are expected to use them.

If employees cannot quickly determine where to store a document, they will hedge their bets by keeping additional copies elsewhere for fear they won’t be able to find it later. In other words, overly complex governance structures can actually drive duplication and hoarding. Keep it simple for any given employee.

Implementing automated deletion

Many records processes depend on employees to manually delete older information. The problem is that most employees don’t—or if they do, they do it inconsistently. Inconsistent deletion bogs down discovery, as you are put in a position of having to prove that something was deleted.

A better approach is to implement automated deletion. Let the repository delete expired emails and files based on retention rules automatically. Limit or eliminate manual deletion processes. Nearly all repositories suspend deletion when a legal hold is implemented.

Repository-driven automatic deletion sometimes feels a little scary to start, but it is much easier and much more compliant.

Stop calling it a “data deletion initiative”

Messaging also matters.

Many organizations launch enterprise-wide “data deletion initiatives.” The name alone can generate immediate resistance.

Employees hear: “The company is about to delete my files.”

Behavior change management works far better when the program is framed around employee benefits: “We have an initiative to identify high-value information. We want to make this information searchable and accessible. We also want to clean up the clutter of low-value or unneeded older information that gets in the way of accessing the important stuff.” This is much better messaging.

Clearly, there is frustration from legal and IT on over-retention. But don’t hobble your initiative at the get-go by calling it a data deletion project. Use better messaging.

Look in the mirror first

The next time employees are accused of ignoring document retention rules, legal operations teams should ask a different question:

“Do we have policies and processes that retain all the right information, and that employees will realistically follow?”

If retention schedules reflect real business needs, classification takes seconds rather than minutes, systems automate deletion, leadership communicates clear benefits, and employee compliance improves dramatically. You’re not pushing against employees, you’re working with them, and a lot more data gets deleted without all of the drama. With these tactics, you’ll win friends, not lose them.