Facing the Economic Storm: Navigating RIM Programs Through Hard Times

The United States and many other nations are experiencing the most severe recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Financial institutions are collapsing, companies are downsizing, and the retail industry is reeling.

The current economic crisis may take years to play out.

Bruce W. Dearstyne, Ph.D.

Economic distress and “fear of losing things” were major themes during the Depression, Studs Terkel observed in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. One person he interviewed, however, recalled that “many of us learned during the Depression how to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.”

In the same vein, records and information management (RIM) program managers need to fight program reductions and seek new opportunities in these hard times. Steadfast leadership, skillful advocacy, effective crisis management, maintaining quality while improvising new approaches, and motivating program staff can help managers pilot their programs toward a better future.

RIM programs have some natural advantages in hard times. Many are modestly resourced even in good times, so they may escape the budget-cutters. Legal records retention/disposition requirements continue unabated. Closing down corporate programs introduces a need to preserve and manage their records. A quest for more economical operations may translate into automation initiatives that result in more electronic records in need of management.

Litigation and electronic information discovery are likely to increase. For instance, investor class-action lawsuits are rising quickly, according to Stanford Law School. John Montaña, a principal of RIM consulting firm The PelliGroup Inc., has pointed out that the backlash from the financial crisis will lead to new legislation, regulation, and litigation that will present a host of new compliance and discovery challenges. These developments should help direct attention – and, hopefully, resources – to RIM.

But RIM programs also have some countervailing vulnerabilities, including:

• A difficulty or lack of experience in documenting impact, cost avoidance/savings, and return-on-investment
• Budget offices often underestimate resource needs because they don’t fully understand the complexity of the RIM function.
• Executives fixate on staff salaries and records center costs and misunderstand RIM as only a “cost center” to be reduced.
• Executives believe that, in a financial pinch, the RIM function can be delegated to other offices such as IT or counsel.
• There is a general belief that employees can “manage” e-records and information at their desktops without guidance from RIM professionals.

In these hard times, here are five strategies RIM professionals can use to navigate through the economic storm:

1. Provide steadfast leadership. The RIM program director must provide constant, highly visible, decisive leadership. The management role – getting the work done well – is upstaged by the leadership role – advocating, communicating, inspiring trust, and keeping morale up. A crisis can be an opportunity for the leader to forge or strengthen an emotional bond with the people he or she is leading. To do that, the leader needs to be involved, visible,
engaged, and in charge.

In times of crisis, people look to the leader to set the tone, instill confidence, chase away fears, and inspire action. “In this volatile and uncertain environment, reality is a moving target …,” notes Ram Charan in his book Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The Right Rules for Getting Things Done in Difficult Times. He urges decisive action: “[You need] realism tempered with optimism … your hands-on participation is essential … be bold … make offensivemoves, not just defensive ones.”

In their book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis point out that leaders step forward and take personal responsibility for confronting and handling crises. They size up the situation, understand the underlying “political” issues, instinctively assess the apprehension that their staff may be feeling, and quickly weigh alternatives. Their ability to “frame” the issue – as a setback to be endured, a threat to be sidestepped, or as something that can be turned around to create a new opportunity – is critical.

Leaders organize for action, even if that action is something of a strategic retreat, and galvanize people to follow. Tichy and Bennis quote the Roman statesman Cato: “When Cicero spoke, people marveled. When Caesar spoke, people
marched.”

Leaders aggressively communicate so everyone who works for them has appropriate, timely information. During critical times, when there is a high degree of uncertainty and the rumor mill is running full-time, it is essential for the program director to share information via presentations at staff meetings, in e-mails, a blog, and just talking with people one-on-one. Employees feel more confident having information, even if the news is bad, than they do in hearing
things piecemeal and worrying about what is around the corner. Sharing information inspires confidence, helps keep morale up, and fosters productivity because employees are not distracted by rumors and misinformation.

2. Let your program’s light shine. Sustaining a robust RIM program in hard times requires that those in positions of authority and in control of resources understand the value, contribution, and impact of the program. Providing exemplary RIM services, demonstrating steady accomplishment, carrying out successful projects, and building a broad base of satisfied “customers” and good will are excellent strategies that will help sustain the program.

The best RIM programs are visible and assertive, report on what they do, and make sure that satisfied customers understand the need for resources for the helpful RIMservices to continue. They strive to keep service levels high even when resources are stretched. They build networkswithin the enterprise – people and offices that appreciate and benefit from their work and are willing to act as advocates for the program in difficult times. They work deftly through advisory committees to get their support.

They continue communicating with their own bosses, reminding them of the program’s enterprise-wide contribution, its frugal use of resources, its flexibility in customizing services, and its planning for the future. Escalating advocacy efforts is essential in hard times because higher-level executives are likely to be besieged by pleas from other program managers and need to make tough choices about which programs to sustain and which ones to curtail.

It is useful to develop, hone, and keep focusing on a fewappropriate advocacy themes before budgetary crises are at the door, and to keep emphasizing them after a crisis hits. Emphasize that RIM:

• Protects and assists the enterprise in the discovery phase of litigation; it is risky to weaken this protection when litigation may be on the rise.
• Fosters better decision-making, employee empowerment, and productivity through making well-organized information accessible when and where needed – an important, economically advantageous benefit in hard times.
• Reduces and helps contain costs through e-mail management, indexing and access systems, and systematic disposition of obsolete records, contributing to institutional budget savings.
• Ensures continuity of operations in case of natural or man-made disasters that might cripple the institution, particularly when it is already challenged.
• Provides expertise and input that are necessary when new IT systems are designed to ensure legal compliance, access to information, and attention to retention/disposition requirements.
• Constitutes a good investment from a business standpoint; slighting it means expensive “deferred maintenance” and a buildup of problems and expenses, including the costs of storing obsolete records and employee time lost to wading through large volumes of unorganized information.
• Changes with the times, tailoring its approaches and services to changes in enterprise needs, employee work styles, legal requirements, and technology advances.

3. Pay more attention to people. The economic situation introduces stress into just about everyone’s life. The anxiety of RIM program staff can increase if there is uncertainty about the programand individuals’ job security. In his book Reducing Stress, Tim Hindle points out that workplace stress can lead to sinking morale, dissatisfied workers who argue with management over assignments, low quality of service, staff turnover, and even physical ailments. He notes that “the emotional symptoms of stress can include general irritability, acute anxiety attacks, depression … loss of a sense of humor, and an inability to concentrate on the simplest of routine tasks.”

The effects can continue long after the causative or contributing factors have eased. To help staff members get through the hard times, RIM program managers may wish to:

• Acknowledge that they, like their staff members, are feeling stress and discuss how they are coping with it.
• Provide regular, constructive feedback and discuss and resolve problems as they arise to keep them from growing larger.
• Be more empathetic toward people and temper criticism of mistakes.
• Reorganize work groups and teams to minimize interpersonal clashes.
• Encourage communication and take more time to patiently answer questions and talk through issues and problems that staff members raise.
• Keep people focused on what the program is doing to cope with problems and ask people to identify new directions for the future
• Give particular attention and support to staff members who seem especially discouraged or overwrought.
• Seek advice and guidance from the organization’s personnel or human resources office for dealing with particularly stressful situations or troubled employees.

4. Use imaginative approaches if downsizing is anticipated. RIM program managers who are faced with the need to scale back do so carefully and systematically with the intention of minimum disruption to their programs and maximum advantage in building back when resources increase. The program’s strategic plan, which identifies priorities, should provide guidance. In general, (1) lower priorities should go first; (2) services to the most critical customers should be continued at a high-quality level; and (3) services need to align with enterprise priorities, which themselves may change as conditions worsen. A few other helpful strategies:

• Use peer networks, such as professional association meetings, listservs, and blogs, to share and derive effective approaches to protecting the RIM program in hard times.
• Take stock of what the program is doing. What services are outdated? Where is it most difficult to measure results? Which ones are too resource intensive compared to their impact? What could be streamlined? Where do customers seem indifferent or disinterested? Get rid of policies, programs, services, and approaches that have outlived their usefulness.
• Look for new ways to cooperate and partner with other offices, including IT, archives, and administrative or management services offices.
• Consider improvised solutions, compromises, and workarounds that preserve quality services but also
  stretch available resources. RIM managers may consider pursuing approaches in the face of budgetary constrictions that they would hesitate to take in times of abundant resources. Managers need to set priorities and keep quality levels high even as they improvise to get things done. For instance:
• Reduce the number and frequency of RIM training seminars and workshops.
• Scale back on resource-intensive customized training and advisory services for small units and offices in favor of more general training and services for larger offices and departments.
• Cut back on paper-based publications and make them available on the RIM program’s website.
• Lengthen the timetable for revision of schedules.
• Defer or scale back on microfilming or digitization projects.
• Press offices to work with the RIM program on disposition of records that have passed their retention periods but are still in the records center.
• Assign relatively less-experienced people to do work that would normally be assigned to more senior people.
• Increase initiatives to obtain volunteers and interns to do appropriate work.
• Revisit outside contracts for RIM work to determine whether some can be done by RIM program staff or, if staff is reduced, whether some work can be shifted to contract.
• Use the employee performance management system effectively. In challenging times, there needs to be more emphasis on timely employee work plans, performance measures, one-on-one meetings and coaching sessions, and development opportunities to help employees increase productivity. Focusing on the program’s most productive people ensures that they do not leave the program and that their morale and contributions stay high. On the other hand,managersmay decide that this is a time when chronically underperforming employees need to improve or leave the program.
• Reconsider the reward system. If salary raises are out of the question and, in fact, salary reductions may be in the offing, RIM managers may find other ways to compensate people, including: spending more time with key employees to demonstrate interest and support; providing more extensive coaching; assigning people to more interesting tasks or work as part of a team on an interesting project; asking for more input and advice on improving program performance; offering “flex-time” options; and providing employees opportunities to speak and write about their work.
• Explore alternatives to layoffs. Laying people off may cripple the program, cause customers to turn away from it, and make it difficult to meet the boss’s reasonable expectations. Once layoffs begin, talented staff members may apply for outside jobs and leave out of fear that they may be laid off next. Management analyst Cali Yost describes a flexible strategy that makes layoffs a last resort: improve workflow planning and communication; improve how people communicate and coordinate; let people work remotely, shift hours, and share offices; allow people close to retirement to scale back on their hours but stay with the program so it retains their expertise; and reduce work hours and salaries rather than letting people go, if the company’s rules and contractual obligations permit it.

5. Capitalize on new opportunities and plan the program’s future. “History has shown that crisis breeds opportunity,” notes a recent BusinessWeek article “Managing Through a Crisis: The New Rules.” “Business leaders may have to cut costs to survive 2009, but the smart ones are also out there looking for prospects.”

That advice also holds true for RIM programs. They may be able to expand their authority and influence and take on new responsibilities (and commensurate resources) by doing work that is related to the economic challenges the parent organization is facing. Examples include:

• Taking a more active role in a financial institution facing investor litigation
• Helping ensure compliance with regulations and requirements of an investment firm, bank, or insurance company receiving federal “bailout” resources
• Stepping in with records management solutions when government employees retire in large numbers and/or units are closed due to budget cuts
• Developing special training opportunities, such as a series of workshops on managing records from closed offices

This is also a time to consider new directions for the future, when the hard times are superseded by better times. Planning strategically for the future helps keep staff focused and upbeat and reminds the CEO about the RIM program’s robust, dynamic nature. For instance:

• The growing interest in “cloud computing” introduces RIM challenges, including custodianship, version control, access, security, and retention/disposition issues.
• Younger employees entering the workforce are prolific, imaginative creators and users of digital information. Meshing new work styles and information habits with RIM tools like records systems and retention schedules will be a challenge.
• President Barack Obama’s emphasis on IT and open government is expected to lead to stronger federal e-records and information management. Specifically, his proposal for electronic medical records is likely to introduce new opportunities in that area.
• State and local governments’ growing use of their websites and portals to support transactions with citizens will require more attention to how the resulting information is organized and maintained.

Getting Through the Hard Times

“What ran through the whole New Deal was finding a way to make things work,” according to another oral recollection in Terkel’s Hard Times. That is a useful concluding insight for RIM program managers. They need to maintain solid RIM principles, keep their program’s mission in mind, maintain the support for their program and the morale of their staff, and find ways to get the work done. Programs that find creative ways to weather these hard times may well come out stronger in the end and will be in a solid position for the future.

Sidebar: Managing Crises Through Stages
Any crisis may be more effectively managed if thought of as an event that unfolds in a series of stages. The book Managing Crises identifies six stages:

1. Head off the crisis. Conduct a “crisis audit” to anticipate what may be in the offing. Meet with staff to share ideas and analyze the program’s situation. Discuss strategies for heading off the problem and options for dealing with it if it arrives. Develop a plan.

2. Prepare to manage the crisis. What decisions will need to be made? Who will make them? What criteria will be applied if there is a need for shrinking the program? How will the manager and staff communicate? Who can we turn to for help? Who is likely to be indifferent or unhelpful?

3. Recognize the crisis. Understand the context, and the company’s competitive and financial situation. Keep in touch with the boss. Gather information, including from your peer network. Understand the magnitude and depth of the crisis before it arrives. As the issue shapes up, get ready to deal with it.

4. Contain the crisis. Take charge, demonstrate decisiveness. Show a real understanding of the impact on people. Communicate about what is happening. Stick to the facts, but interpret them so people can understand them. Counter false information and rumors with explanations and facts.

5. Resolve the crisis. Turn fear into action, activate the crisis plan, and help everyone work together. As Ram Charan says in his book Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The Right Rules for Getting Things Done in Difficult Times: “Do what needs to be done. Rules, policies, structures, procedures, and budgets” are fine in the normal course of business, but in a difficult situation “do whatever has to be done and don’t worry about the ‘rules.’”

6. Learn from the crisis. Learn as you go and review after the crisis is resolved. Could we have prevented the problem or contained it? What did we do right? What could have gone better? How should we apply the insights into continuing problems and those likely to be on the horizon?

Bruce W. Dearstyne may be contacted at Dearstyne@verizon.net.

From March - April 2009