The Five Seconds That Will Make or Break Your Records Management Program

Many organizations spend months crafting policies and developing training programs on records management. Companies roll out what looks like a solid records program, then watch compliance fall flat because employees don’t follow the guidelines for classifying files and emails. It could be easy to conclude that employees are lazy or resistant, but that would be wrong. Maybe it is not them; maybe the problem is with your program, or more specifically, the lack of automation in your implementation. To achieve any level of compliance, records programs need to follow the “five-second rule.”

Manual steps made sense in a paper-based world where employees physically moved documents into storage boxes as they aged. But many of these same manual processes have been carried over to electronic information, and that’s where the trouble starts. These programs often require employees to take a series of time-consuming steps for every email or file, such as navigating deep folder hierarchies or choosing from lengthy drop-down menus of retention labels. Even diligent employees tend to give up over time. It’s not because they’re uncooperative. The sheer volume of digital information today means that even a 20-second classification task, repeated dozens of times a day, adds up to hours of work each week. Faced with complicated rules, confusing folder structures, and the expectation to apply metadata or move content into designated repositories, most employees delay the task or simply bypass the system altogether.

This is where the “five-second rule” for records management comes into play (it’s also a key strategy for preventing employees from hoarding electronic documents). In practice, employees will spend no more than five seconds classifying an email or document before they move on. And this short window not only needs to cover records management processes, but also classification processes for privacy, confidential and other sensitive information, eDiscovery rules, and access controls. If it takes longer, these processes simply won’t be followed.

Avoid unmanaged repositories

All of this points to one conclusion: to be effective, a records program process must be automated as much as possible. To automate, information must live in a repository that can automatically apply governance. First, documents should not live in “unmanaged” repositories that do not have the capability of automatically applying governance rules. Unmanaged repositories include files shares, employees’ personal storage cloud-based storage such as Box, and unconfigured systems such as SharePoint where automated disposition has not been enabled. Information in these unmanaged systems should be migrated to managed systems such as Microsoft M365, OpenText, or others. These systems should be configured to automatically apply retention and disposition, access control, and collaboration.

Consider your existing technology

Companies often already have these managed systems; in that case, they simply need to be configured to support the governance rules. For example, Microsoft 365 has many native information governance capabilities built into the basic E3 version. Using “drag and drop” inheritance, the system can be taught all the retention and data security classification rules. When an employee stores a document in a managed folder, or simply drags an email into a SharePoint site, the system knows to automatically apply the appropriate retention and sensitive labels. This drag and drop process only takes a few seconds, and the system does the rest. Similar governance capabilities are available in other systems including most contract lifecycle management software tools. (Note: Contoural is an independent provider. We do not sell or take referral fees from Microsoft or any other vendor.)

Think communication

The other key component is driving effective behavior change management through messaging, communication, training and audit. When information is managed in the right repositories, it makes life better for employees. They can find information much faster and collaborate better within or across departments. 

In the end, the “make or break” factor for your records program really does boil down to those five seconds. If your approach demands more than a few seconds of an employee’s time and attention, it will likely break the program. People will circumvent the system, and you’ll be back to square one with uncontrolled information sprawl. But if you invest in making those few seconds seamless and automatic, you set your program up to succeed. The key is designing a process that works with human nature (minimal effort, maximal simplicity) rather than against it.