Did you ever consider assessing what type of documents are housed in your office files? What are the typical documents found in most of our offices? First of all, we have paper and electronic documents, and other formats such as DVD's, video training material, and others.
Do we consider e-mail to be a part of our business documents? We certainly must.
E-mail has skyrocketed in growth in the past few years, and companies rely on e-mail as a prime method of communication. Information is crucial to their success in business. They are as important as any other document, which make up records we work with on a daily basis.
E-mail attachments have value to your business operations and are created, distributed, and shared instantly without much thought about the long term effects of keeping the attachments, or coordinating them with your assigned categories in your filing system for quick access and retrieval.
This is a time to look at your system and do a simple review and do the exercise with your staff on how to handle e-mail and their attachments. Look at how you have filed your paper and electronic documents,and evaluate each e-mail attachment as you receive it.
Review your files and ask yourself if they are they still needed. Does the company have a policy for the retention periods, how long to keep important or crucial documents? Who keeps what? When there is a mass mail out to employees, who keeps the original message, or in fact, any other message with replies in the same department? Who keeps the record if it has a legal, fiscal, or historical value?
Many employees may not realize that each e-mail message created on their desktop belongs to the company. It is important to be enlightened by what can be requested as e-discovery in case of litigation. What is the content of the message and what is it conveying? Our messages should be written as if they world was reading them.
A simple e-mail message about any business activity, instructions, or discussions may be of importance to decision making, educational purposes, projects, ownership, or requests for e-discovery.
Once you have established that e-mail attachments have a certain value to the company, determine how and what can be kept, for how long, or deleted from anyone's desktop since this is becoming a major problem with the growth of electronic messages accumulating in everyone's mailbox.
Information Technology departments, in certain cases, may request that you limit what you keep and may send a message out to all concerned that there is a deadline for keeping messages in the deleted area, or the number of e-mails permitted in a mailbox. Are there any instructions as to where to keep any documents of importance as the employee should not rely on the e-mail inbox as a storage place.
Francine Renaud,
Document Management Consultant
http://www.timeouttoorganize.com/ Tel: 250-763-3988
Business document management is the most important work which every firm uses , as documents may be secret or may be much important so we have to proper manage those business documents.
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