Managing Personnel Records - International Records Management ...

Life Span of Personnel Records
Personnel records remain active for very long periods.
Personnel records will usually remain in use by the originating department for the
duration of the career of the employee in question. In many cases this will be decades.
In addition, organisations often take some responsibility for the welfare of retired
staff. Thus a personnel department may need to access personal files even after the
person has retired. Moreover, the organisation will need to maintain and update some
records about a retired member of staff while that person (or his or her dependents)
are receiving a pension. This means that decisions about the technology used to create
and maintain personnel records must take into account the need to access records for
at least 70 years. This is particularly relevant when electronic record-keeping systems
are being evaluated.
Quantity of Personnel Records
Personnel records are voluminous.
Typically the public service maintains very large volumes of personnel records and
the majority of these continue to be held on paper. The failure to manage these
records will lead to significant wastage of office space and have major implications in
terms of cost and staff time. It is therefore essential that changes to the management
of personnel records should be ‘piloted’ or tested on a small scale to ensure that they
are well designed before large-scale implementation. Failure to do this may lead to
costly errors.
Activity 2
How do you think your organisation might make use of the information in your
personnel file? How might you make use of that information? Write down as many
ideas as you can think of for each question. Also write down a description of how
you expect the government to manage personal information about you.
MANAGING PERSONNEL RECORDS
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