Avoiding a records management nightmare

If you think about it, the people who should most likely be suffering from cumulative trauma disorder, low back pain, respiratory difficulty, and work-related stress are professional basketball players. The cumulative trauma would result from the constant dribbling, the low back pain from the jumping and reaching, the respiratory difficulty from running in smoke-filled arenas, and the stress from concern over whether their agents will be able to negotiate sufficiently lucrative contracts.

Yet read the sports pages. How many complaints do you hear from professional basketball players about ailments? None. Strains, sprains, and bruises are taken in stride and players routinely play hurt. Only when they tear a ligament or break a bone do you hear about it, and then only because they are temporarily sidelined while they get themselves rehabilitated. When a major injury occurs, the information is presented as a routine announcement from the team physician, not as a whining gripe from the individual. The players have their operations, they receive their therapy, and they're back on the court--doing their job.

Why is that? Is it because:

1) things hurt less for $1.5 million a year?

2) players have "team spirit" and really can't wait to get out there and play, pain or not?

3) players realize that if there is even a hint of malingering the coach is likely to seek a replacement and they are not anxious to start their second career as a fast food chef?

Although conventional wisdom has it that reason two is the answer, reason three is probably closer to the truth. Certainly, there is a degree of spirit involved for any professional sportsman, but the fact is, nobody likes or wants to play while injured. These guys are making sure they keep their jobs]

Compare the situation just described with that in the office. In the office, not only do people not "play hurt," a lot of them don't play well] Not that people should come to work injured, but exactly what constitutes an injury is open for some discussion. A broken back is probably legitimate; a bad horoscope reading probably isn't. Both, however, have been used and accepted as reasonable excuses within the office environment.

The office, of course, is not a basketball court. The majority of office workers have no fear of replacement for anything short of committing mass murder in the executive cafeteria. Although there are layoffs due to organizational upheavals such as downsizing, rightsizing, and outsourcing, those incidents can be placed in the "overtaken by events" category, they are not the same as "replacement for cause." Replacement for cause, i.e., being "fired," is virtually unheard of anymore because these days nobody is responsible.

NOT RESPONSIBLE

Being responsible means that one is answerable, legally or morally, for the discharge of a duty, trust, or debt. It means that one is able to perceive the distinctions between right and wrong, and is able to act accordingly. It used to be that responsibility was something that was taught in the home, reinforced in the school, and, like other character attributes such as honesty and integrity, was a basic requirement for being considered a "good person." All that changed in the 1960s.

The 1960s ushered in the era of "feeling good about self." Thanks to the psychological establishment, the issue of "character" was turned completely upside down. It no longer mattered what type of individual a person was, as long as he felt good about being that way. If a person didn't feel good about who he was--for whatever reason--he was deemed to have a "psychological problem."

In our society, a person with a psychological problem is not responsible for his behavior and therefore cannot be held accountable. Carried to the ultimate extreme in the legal arena, this is the basis for the insanity defense. What has happened, however, as the "feeling good about self" message has spread over the past three decades, is that a modified insanity defense (we might call it the "merely troubled defense") has been applied across the social spectrum. The "troubles" are many and varied. They span the alphabet from attention deficit disorder to zodiacal irregularity. The result of their proliferation is a pervasive societal mind-set that: 1) absolves individuals with psychological problems from responsibility, and 2) ensures that almost everyone can place themselves in the category of having psychological problems.

It starts in early childhood. Children of unwed mothers in ghettos are not responsible because they have psychological problems from being impoverished. Latch-key children of yuppies in suburbia are not responsible because they have psychological problems due to being left alone. Children of alcoholics are not responsible because they have psychological problems from living with drunken parents. Children of the super-rich are not responsible because they have psychological problems from being indulged.

Everywhere, it seems, there are fragile psyches just waiting to be shattered, and everywhere there are psychologists intervening to prevent the shattering. Each time some unexpected event transpires, local TV news reporters are on the scene--not at the event, but in the classroom--filming children as the psychologists exhort them to "get in touch with their feelings" and to "talk about" whatever it was that occurred. Soundbite terms like "emotional trauma" and "permanent psychological scarring" are bandied about.

The problems are deemed to be so serious that one has to wonder how previous generations possibly survived without psychological counseling. One also has to wonder if children who might otherwise never have given two-seconds thought to the matters being discussed are now, through the power of suggestion, being coaxed into having adverse reactions.

BUT I'M NOT OK

Children who are coddled and told they are not responsible grow up to be adults--who are not responsible. Depending on the individuals, their troubles might be blamed for everything from the inability to sustain a relationship to the inability to function effectively in the workplace. (It is only the latter factor we are concerned with in this article.)

Although there are some positions (in law enforcement, for example) where individuals are given examinations to determine their psychological profiles prior to being hired, most office jobs have no such requirements. Assuming that one can remain stable for the 35 minutes it takes to be interviewed, one can get an office job. Once on the job, of course, stability is no longer mandatory. In fact, if one is interested in reducing one's workload, stability is an absolute disadvantage.

Since being irresponsible is acceptable as long as there is an underlying difficulty to blame it on, all that is needed is a creative complaint. Because of the vast inroads made by the pop psychologists (go to the bookstore and compare the number of psychology books with those of any other category except fiction), virtually any affliction is allowable.

The range of maladies is mindboggling. Some people stick with the psychobabble they grew up hearing and blame their problems on dysfunctional families. Others look to the occult for answers and blame their problems on discharging crystals. Most people seeking to avoid work, however, wish to remain somewhat more within the mainstream. They realize that while the dysfunctional family would sound great on the couch, and the crashing crystal would bring empathy from the eccentric, a more tenable explanation will be necessary if they are to convince their coworkers that they are not merely malingering. Ergonomics has been a boon for such individuals.

BLAME IT ON THE FURNITURE

Ergonomics is the science of adapting work or working conditions to suit the worker. Ergonomics made a big splash in the early 1970s when it was linked with office landscaping and promoted as a way of increasing office worker productivity. Unlike time and motion study, however, which also deals with adapting work and working conditions to suit the worker, the goal of ergonomics is the comfort and health of the individual, not his efficiency. When increased office worker productivity failed to materialize, ergonomics was put on the "back burner" until the 1980s when employee health became a major issue.

Today, ergonomics is on the "front burner" of every major organization. To suggest purchasing anything but ergonomically designed furniture is tantamount to advocating the employment of children in mines. It is so incorrect it is not even thought about. Yet despite the increase in ergonomic understanding and the commensurate increase in the amount of money spent to make the workplace healthier and safer, the number of reported office job "injuries" is rising instead of going down.

It is understandable that a certain number of persons in any given workforce would be adversely affected by cumulative trauma disorder, low back pain, respiratory problems, and work-related stress. All can be legitimate medical problems. All are maladies, however, that one must acquire on one's own; they cannot be caught from or transmitted to another individual. And yet, although an "epidemic" of such ailments is impossible, they are occurring in epidemic proportions. The majority of private industry illnesses reported to the Bureau of Labor Statistics are categorized as cumulative trauma disorders.

When a situation is totally illogical, there has to be a logical explanation-as there is here. An overwhelming number of sore wrists, backs, lungs, and heads are due to "perceived injuries." They are, in a word, psychosomatic. Is there pain? In many instances, yes. But it is self-induced. Studies have shown that more than 80 percent of the people who complain of chronic pain syndrome had "psychological problems" while growing up. These people are predisposed to have difficulties and indeed look for difficulties to have at every opportunity.

What could be better for the malingerer than to avoid work and be able to blame it on the furniture. The below-average producers find fault with the shape or height or design of their keyboards. The chronically late claim headaches due to improperly-angled video screens and the toxic rays emanating from them. The social butterflies say that their chairs hurt their backs, the glare from the lights hurts their eyes, and they are allergic to the new paint on the wall. All can be credible complaints--and all are extremely difficult to prove one way or the other.

A RECORDS MANAGEMENT NIGHTMARE

What has all this got to do with records management? Plenty] Historically, because the records management function was often viewed by senior managers as little more than a low-level operation which was more of a necessary evil than a valuable resource, records management departments were used as "personnel dumps." The employee who could do nothing was transferred to records management. The employee who could get along with nobody was transferred to records management. Anyone who needed to be fired but couldn't be was transferred to records management. In the best of circumstances, there was only one individual of this nature on the staff and the rest of the people worked around him. In the worst cases, a manager who needed to be outplaced was put in charge of the records management function, problem employees were transferred in wholesale lots, and the entire department became little more than a daycare center for the terminally unmanageable.

It is still going on. In fact, with the number of "perceived injuries" increasing daily, and with managers generally inclined to take the course of least resistance when dealing with difficult employees, it is more apt to happen now than in the past. It is most likely to occur, of course, in organizations where records management is still considered to be a less-than-vital function. If a records management organization is called "the files," it is susceptible. If a records center is referred to as "the warehouse," it is vulnerable. If a records management program consists of an annual cleanout campaign--then it probably deserves whatever it gets.

AVOIDING IT

It is difficult enough to do the records management job when operating under satisfactory conditions. When functioning with castoffs and ne'er-do-wells, it is virtually impossible. There are, however, things that can be done to minimize the risk of becoming the employer oflast resort.

The records manager must ensure that senior managers are aware of what comprehensive and properly functioning records management programs can do for them, and, more importantly, what the absence of such programs can mean to them] In order to do this, the traditional approach to "selling" records management by emphasizing the programmatic cost savings must be discarded in favor of a more pragmatic approach, that of selling protection. To do this, however, one needs to understand certain realities.

Managers are not interested in saving space. They are interested in avoiding the problems that will ensue if they run out of space. Likewise, managers are not interested in saving money. They are interested in avoiding the problems that will result if they run out of money. THE CONCERN OF ALL MANAGERS ALL THE TIME IS AVOIDING PROBLEMS] Of course, managers don't always avoid problems, but that is more a result of poor decision making than a lack of preference.

If avoiding problems is a managerial priority, records managers must understand this and must position themselves so that they are seen as the ones who help managers address that concern. If rapid information retrieval is the difficulty, the records manager should be able to show how a conversion to optical disk might help to avoid a problem. If litigation is the issue, the records manager must be able to show how disposal of records in the normal course of business under an approved records schedule will help to avoid a problem.

In the process of protecting senior managers by helping them to avoid problems, records managers will be ensuring their own organizational survival. If senior managers understand that a properly designed and operating records management program is one of the keys to problem avoidance, they will make certain that nothing is done to damage that program. If they understand that trained, knowledgeable, and professional personnel are necessary in order to guarantee a properly designed and operating records management program, then that is the kind of personnel the program will get. If there is any doubt that this approach is viable, one need only look to the organization's legal office--the ultimate bastion of managerial protection. There are no castoffs there]

AFTERTHOUGHT

Inevitably, there will be those who disagree with the foregoing. They will consider the observations to be misanthropic, the conclusions to be cynical, and the approach to the personnel predicament to be Machiavellian. They will suggest that living today is harder than at any time in the past and that people are naturally more likely to become unnerved and stressed. They will say that the vast majority of employees in organizations are hard working and steady and that those who fall short should be given the benefit of any doubt regarding their imperfections. And they will assert that managers usually have the best interests of their organizations and their employees in mind when they make decisions and that to insinuate otherwise is unfair. They are entitled to their opinions--and they will have to live with the results of having them.

AUTHOR: Ira A. Penn, CRM, CSP, is the Editor of the Records Managemenf Quarterly, a professional journal published by ARMA International. He is a Senior Management Analyst with the U.S. Federal Government and has some 32 years experience in records and information management. In 1990 he was presented the Emmett Leahy Award for his contributions and outstanding accomplishments in the information and records management field. Active in ARMA International at the Association level, Mr. Penn was the recipient of the coveted Award of Merit in 1985 and received the designation of Association Fellow in 1990. He was also active in the Institute of Certified Records Managers, served for eight years on its Board of Regents, and received the Institute's Award of Merit in 1992.

Mr. Penn is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. An accomplished writer, he won the prestigious ARMA Britt Literary Award in 1979 and is one of the principal authors of the Records Management Handbook, an international text published in London, England. A popular speaker, Mr. Penn is in demand for his thought-provoking, controversial, and down-to-earth presentations.

Copyright Association of Records Managers and Administrators Inc. Jan 1996
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