Helping your staff with their records responsibilities
People are an important part of your agency’s records management systems. People enter data into the system and extract information. By considering people in your systems design, implementation and management, you can influence their behaviour.
Where a system is supporting a highly structured work process, it is possible to automate records tasks such as creation and capture, metadata allocation, access management and disposal. This should be easier for your staff, and is likely to increase the quality of the information collected and retained.
Where a process cannot be automated, as is the case for many policy or analytical tasks, staff need to make decisions about what records to create and take action to capture them into a records managment system.
Make sure your staff know their responsibilities
Staff need to know what records management tasks have to be done and who is responsible for each task. This includes the task of quality control – making sure that records management is done well enough to mitigate the risks of the activity.
In some cases, you may assign responsibilities to a particular individual or staff position. In other cases, you may assign responsibilities to particular work groups or sections, or to all staff across the agency. Regardless of the allocation of responsibilities, you must ensure that they are clearly documented in policies, procedures and guidelines to ensure accountability.
For more information about roles and responsibilities of particular staff groups, including managers, information and records managers, information and communication technology staff and all staff, see Roles and responsibilities.
Train your staff
In order to fulfil records management responsibilities, they will need to understand:- what a record is
- when a record should be made
- what the record needs to document
- where the record should be kept
- how the record should be captured
- what monitoring, auditing and reporting is required
The National Archives’ package Keep the Knowledge may assist with training in these areas.
Even when records management cannot be automated, it can still be integrated into work processes through policies and procedures.