The Gamification of Records Management

Aside from those who are in the field, no one thinks records management is fun.  It is the office-equivalent of doing laundry or cleaning out the garage. However, for our organizations, having information owners properly retain or dispose of information can be an issue that has legal, financial, productivity, and publicity consequences. The best policies or retention schedules are only as good as how well they are followed. So how to get information owners to comply?

There are carrots and sticks. Sticks being: “comply with this policy or face the consequences.” A department may be audited, an employee may be sanctioned. But unless there is a major issue such as a data breach where information that should have been deleted is discovered or hacked or held for ransomware, there are few downsides for information owners to skimp on good records hygiene.

Then there are the carrots: Gamification is a well-known strategy for influencing behavior. Most obviously, there are casinos where the promise of payouts will keep a slot machine player putting money into the one-armed bandit. It also explains why people will flock to the release of the latest Nintendo machine. So, how can we incorporate gamification to improve buy-in and compliance with our organizations’ records regime?

First, the incentive has to match the goal. In my previous company we had an event where we had to move a large number of physical records out of storage areas and either digitize or destroy them. There was a prize given to the person who could find their oldest record. My boss at the time had a box of computer punch cards from the 1950s that won the reward. 

Of course, the data on the punch cards was no longer subject to a retention schedule or hold order, had we even been able to retrieve it. However, the exercise made people review their records and led to a lot of disposal bins being filled with redundant, obsolete and trivial documents. It was a success.

The same issue came up in a digital area when my company moved from one email system to another. Employees were given an option to migrate the records or allow them to expire. There were incentives for users who migrated early and literally thousands of documents were given up by their owners as not important.

Gamification does not mean that we want information owners to destroy records that are needed.  There can be unintended consequences from such a strategy.

As an example, in Senegal a few years ago there was a rash of disposable plastic bags littering the countryside, so the government offered a few cents for each bag collected and recycled. The cost of a roll of polyethylene bags was so much less than the bag bounty, that unscrupulous people would buy rolls of bags and turn them in and pocket the difference, leaving the situation worse than before.

In terms of records management, we would not want a game that encourages information owners to dispose of information that is needed for legal or regulatory purposes. The game should be to have users keep needed records and destroy unneeded records based on the physical or ERM platform you are using.

The first and most obvious approach is to have information owners read and understand the policy and be rewarded for doing so. In my company I created an educational module and participants who completed it were awarded a “badge.” It had no financial value, so my accountants liked that, but studies have shown that even non-financial rewards will make people happy and encourage compliance.

Many of us can recall receiving “gold stars” from our elementary school teachers. If my badge system convinced someone to spend twenty minutes watching a video and answering some questions about our policy, that was one less person who was clueless about the goals of information governance. And my job was that much easier.

The next step would be to use metrics. For example, if you could find out that a department had a Box or Jira or Slack repository or an email account that had not been accessed in more than a year and they decided to do a cleanup, you could provide some kind of recognition, maybe even a pizza party. 

If there is a file room with boxes of the aforementioned punch cards (or floppy disks or stone tablets) you could have a clean-up session with rewards for deleting or evaluating the information. You might determine a unit of information, say a box or X number of megabytes of files. Give out Hershey’s miniatures for every unit dealt with.

Going further, based on IT or budgetary constraints you could use AI to determine, based on the content of a record, it’s age and how it fits into your retention schedule to see if the owner has appropriately classified it and reward them accordingly, with badges or Hershey’s Kisses, depending on your budget. 

Certainly, there are vendors and apps that can do at least some this, but most often they will rely on the stick: “You are out of compliance.” And they forget the carrot: “This is great, you actually know and follow our policy.”

Understandably, people other than records managers have their own jobs to do. But providing incentives can make our organizations better and facilitate our own positions as information governance managers.

Game on.