Escape from the irresponsibility trap

In his January, 1995 article, "Avoiding A Records Management Nightmare," RMQ Editor Ira Penn lamented the absence of a sense of responsibility in the modern office. He noted how apparently fragile modern workers have become. Some are "devastated" by newly discovered social dissonances. Some are incapacitated by imagined illnesses. Some are crippled by uncomfortable furniture. But most numerous are those who are "stressed out" by psychological "traumas" that used to be laughed off. Yes, it often seems that modern office workers have discovered an endless source of readymade excuses for doing as little as possible and doing it as poorly as they can get away with.

Penn has argued that records management departments are especially vulnerable to this unproductive point of view, because executive levels have viewed the records management function as a "personnel dump," where workers with these irresponsible proclivities can be unloaded. Penn has also given us a simple solution that rests on what he has convincingly portrayed as management's most basic concern: To avoid problems. Thus, we need only persuade executive management that records management is a function that will enable them to resolve-or even better, avoid-their most pressing problems, be it the headaches of litigation or the lack of quickly accessible information upon which to base a decision.

Unfortunately, the records manager who sets out to implement Penn's suggestion may find it not quite so easy as it seems at first. How is he or she to convince the organization's executives that records management is ready and able to solve their most pressing problems, if records management is staffed with irresponsible cast-offs? How can records management prove its value if the staff is interested less in increasing productivity than in receiving higher pay for less work, collecting worker's compensation, or doing as little as possible without being disciplined? We are caught in a Catch-22:

To gain a responsible staff, records managers must convince executive management of their ability to solve management's problems.

To convince executive management of their ability to solve problems, records managers must have a responsible staff.

ESCAPING THE DILEMMA

The only possible way out of this dilemma is to develop responsibility within the current records management staff. There are, of course, many gradations of responsibility. Just showing up for work on pay day is more responsible than not coming at all. However, the kind of responsibility that will enable us to solve management's problems implies a very high level of reliability and competence. Above all, it requires a commitment to the organization totally opposite the irresponsibility in Penn's nightmare. Concrete manifestations of this kind of commitment include:

That you stay until five, even if the boss leaves at four.

That you stay and correct your errors, no matter how tedious and even though no one would ever have known you were the one who made them.

That you grit your teeth and complete the project on time, even though your head is throbbing with a migraine, your hands are aching with arthritis, and your back seems to scream for a chiropractor.

That you voluntarily admit that you goofed up, even though you could easily blame someone else.

That you go through the boxes of files to make 100% certain the missing document is not there, even though you are already 99% sure it couldn't be.

That you do more than your share, even though the frequently praised guy who earns more than you does not do his.

Developing this type of "responsibility" in a records management department that Penn has with some justification described as a dumping ground for personnel blunders faces several seemingly impossible hurdles, which are briefly described in this article.

FLAGRANT ABUSERS OF THE SYSTEM

The first obstacle to developing responsibility within a records management section is the one which Penn's article has so graphically described: The elaboration of medical, sociological, and psychological excuses for non-productive behavior. I do not totally agree in assigning so much of the blame for this development on psychologists, sociologists, and medical doctors. To some extent I believe that the theoretical models they have elaborated to "explain" such behavior are more a reflection than a cause of society's willingness to accept such excuses. Moreover, "liberal" legislative and judicial interpretations seem at least as much to blame. Be that as it may, few would question that some employees are able to make a joke of the concept of "fair pay for a fair day's work."

My own experience validates Penn's concerns. His words immediately brought to mind memories of two cases. The first was a man who worked under my supervision several years ago. When he started to work for us inputting index data and auditing reports, he did an excellent job. But after a period of several months, I noticed that the accuracy of his work began to deteriorate, and several of his coworkers began to complain that he kept falling asleep on the job. Happening to walk by on one of the occasions when he nodded off, I suggested in as friendly a voice as I could muster that his performance rating might improve if he were awake. Following this occasion, I began a series of "progressive disciplinary" steps that included counseling, warning, and disciplinary suspension. At the conclusion of each step, he assured me that his performance would improve. Just before it became time for the termination step, he called in sick and never returned.

A few weeks afterwards, his claim of discrimination received a formal hearing by the Personnel Office, which upheld my handling of the situation. Two months later, I was subpoenaed by the Worker's Compensation Court. By this time, he was claiming that my demand that he keep busy and do accurate work had resulted in a worsening of his hypertension. I also learned, to my surprise, that he had a long history of both hypertension and alcoholism. Nevertheless, after a year or so of hearings that wasted our organization's time and money, the court awarded him $10,000 in damages. For it determined that my discipline, whether justified or not, had worsened the man's hypertension. Although I am certainly no lawyer and would not argue with the basic premises of "no fault" insurance, it still seems somewhat strange that someone with an unreported history of alcoholism and hypertension should receive damages for being told to reduce careless errors and stop sleeping on the job.

The second case was someone who worked under the supervision of another records manager. This person had originally worked in another department, but had been so frequently late to work that she was ultimately terminated. She contested this termination with the support of a psychologist-undoubtedly one of those that Penn had in mind-who stated that the employee suffered from a mental illness that "made her be late." On the basis of this opinion, the termination was overturned. Since the department that had fired her did not want her back, the personnel office and legal department convinced the records manager to accept her for a new position that had cost the records manager endless months of pleading and negotiation to have approved. This was a classic example of Penn's depiction of records management as a dump for personnel that no one else wants.

When I think of these experiences, I am tempted to agree with Penn that the psychologists and legal system are turning records management departments into dumping grounds for undesirable personnel. However, reality breaks in and reminds me that the two examples above are the only ones I have firsthand knowledge of. I remember that the majority of our records management staffs are quite different.

THE "NOT MY FAULT" OBSTACLE TO RESPONSIBILITY

I believe that a better case can be made that responsible behavior in the modern office is undermined by an attitude that is much more widespread than the blatant abuse of the system exhibited by the two isolated cases described above. The attitude to which I refer is an unwillingness to take responsibility for mistakes and failures-an attitude sometimes referred to as CYA (euphemistically translated as Cover Your own Assets). This attitude is not limited to irresponsible job shirkers, but appears at all levels among staff seemingly dedicated to their jobs. The results are nearly always failure to address real systemic problems and follow up on new opportunities for the organization.

CYA behavior is often associated with fire-fighting tactics. Such tactics usually emphasize extinguishing small blazes threatening one's own immediate position at the expense of addressing systemic problems and carefully evaluating opportunities. Records management staffs are accustomed to this tactic in connection with demands for excessively extensive searches for the "one document that will show I was right." Often they receive this type of demand from other offices; sometimes, they initiate it themselves to prove their own innocence. But no matter whose reputation they are designed to preserve or enhance, such searches are nearly always characterized by (1) asking several people to look in the same place for the same thing; (2) initiating a time-consuming search for a record in a group of files where it is 99% certain not to be found; and (3) emphasizing speed with little concern for the consequent interruption of regular processes. Since the discovery of the document, which frequently is not found, is usually much more critical to an individual's reputation than to the organization's well-being, the waste of resources in pursuing it can hardly be made compatible with organizational responsibility.

I, myself, am guilty of sometimes being more concerned with avoiding criticism than in making certain that office processes as a whole are operating smoothly. Thus, I am careful to check that the cases I am personally handling have been done correctly and on time. But my review of the status of the work assigned to others in my department is much less extensive, even though I might expect to find more errors there. Similarly, I have often spent hours searching for a particular record, not so much because finding the record was important as because I wanted to impress the V.I.P. wanting it or because not finding it would tarnish my reputation. From the standpoint of organizational values, I would have spent my time far more usefully reviewing document capture and indexing practice to ensure that all documents would be easier to retrieve. My wastefulness is even more pronounced when I get several coworkers to duplicate my efforts in searching for the same thing. This type of fire-fighting mentality may succeed in extinguishing an isolated blaze, but it leaves the organization much more vulnerable to a large-scale conflagration. A truly responsible employee is concerned with organizational wellbeing rather than in showy personal victories and blamelessness.

Wasteful CYA is also manifest in the hours spent preparing "white papers" for questionable actions. For example, I wrote a report explaining that a shortage of records storage boxes has not been caused by my oversight but by procurement's delays in processing. I can also remember spending hours pouring over a written explanation of contracting with a microfilm vendor that went bankrupt before completing the project for which we had already paid. What a waste of time! How much more in the organization's interest-and more responsible on my part-would it be to address the problems and opportunities which I can do something about, instead of wasting time writing memos to absolve myself of past failures or potential catastrophes?

DISHEARTENING CHARACTER OF SUPPORT SERVICES

Like other "administrative services" personnel, records management staff are not directly involved with the organization's primary mission. In fact, they are even more alienated from the final product than those in most other general services. In the transportation agency where I work, the custodial staff that clean the train stations and the buses may not have the prestige of transportation engineers, but at least they are directly involved with the organization's primary service. At least they understand what they are working on and can see the immediate, positive results of what they do. When I arrived at our agency as a records manager, I found myself analyzing and indexing records that might as well have been in a foreign language. In perusing engineering correspondence that I needed to index, I quickly realized that "dewatering," "traction power," and "potholing" would be important key words, and I used them to index a good many documents without having any real idea of what they meant. Riding home from work, I would muse over whether "potholing" meant filling in the potholes in the road with asphalt, and if so why rail engineers would be so concerned with it. I would wonder if "traction power" referred to the amount of energy required to overcome the friction between a wheel on the train and the track. "Dewatering" remained a mystery. Maybe, I thought, it had something to do with moving the city water pipes that block the path of the subway tunnel we were digging. Probably, even if you are not a civil engineer, you will recognize that my understanding of the documents I was indexing was similar to the comprehension of brain surgery by the hospital orderly who cleans the bed pans. Records management staff providing litigation support will have the same experience: Why the document we finally find proves so crucial to a case often remains a total mystery to us.

My point is that, no matter how necessary they may be, "support services" like records management inevitably suffer from a sense of alienation. Because they have not dedicated years to studying the primary product or service provided by the organization, they do not really understand the impact of what they do or the contribution they make. Because their role is "secondary," they usually feel like-and often are treated like-"second-class" members of the organization. These are not the types of feelings that promote a sense of dedication to the organization. How can we expect a person to feel "responsible" for what he or she does not even understand?

The support character of administrative service functions also negatively impacts the recruitment of new staff. Michael Pemberton, in his series of RMQ columns on professionalism in records management, has pointed out that talented young people generally aspire towards the more established professions, such as law, medicine, or engineering. Not many children dream of becoming custodians or file clerks when they grow up. (Admittedly, when I was five, I used to pull my little red wagon around the yard playing trash collector, but then I was pretty weird.) As a result of their lack of status, records management and facilities maintenance sections tend to be staffed with those who lack either the ambition or the ability to succeed in more glamorous (and better paid) careers. Are we really going to feel as dedicated to a job that we accepted only because we could not get anything better?

THE PROBLEM OF LABORUNION MENTALITY

In the agency where I work, most records and mail clerks are members of a labor union. Although certainly not universally true, the union members' primary loyalty is often to the union, and this tends to dilute their organizational responsibility. The final authority for them is the union contract, a document that contains inflexible rules that many times hamper the agency's attempts to increase productivity. Thus, the contract's specification that mail must be distributed in a certain way or documents filed in a certain way can easily impede automated processes like electronic workflow and automated document image management. Because the contract specifies that salary levels and promotions are strictly determined on the basis of senioritywith no provision for rewarding merit-there is little incentive for a worker to do anything beyond what is specifically spelled out in his job description.

Of course, in most organizations, records management staffs are not unionized. However, where clerical jobs are straightforward and repetitive, with little room for creativity or decision-making, similar-if not so obviously counter-productiveways of thinking are likely to prevail: The clerks will do the job described years ago in the job description-and nothing more.

ESCAPING THE CATCH 22: DEVELOPING A RESPONSIBLE STAFF ANYWAY

Despite the obstacles to developing an organizationally responsible records management staff, the challenge is not insurmountable. First, consider the human material with which we have to work. Along with the examples of employees whose idea of a job is showing up on payday and clocking out on time, most of us are familiar with many more who really want to do a good job and even go beyond what is expected. We know of those who get the job done even if they have a good excuse not to. I think immediately of the mail carrier whom I wrote about in my last column, and his determination to deliver the mail accurately and expediently no matter how much effort on his part is required. The fact that he is a good member of the union reminds me that union membership does not necessarily imply lack of responsibility.

I think of another employee who does continual data entry and has developed a carpal tunnel syndrome. She could easily have claimed worker's compensation or demanded another job. Instead, she gets cortisone injections and wears a variety of braces so that she can continue to enter data even when it is painful. When we stop and reflect on the employees we so often forget because they cause no problem, we realize that the majority of employees still want to work. Some of my previous examples and Penn's laments to the contrary, the employees who "work the system" are in the minority. The challenge is to find ways to help basically responsible employees to continue developing the responsibility to which they are already oriented. Below are a few ideas for achieving that goal.

THE USEFULNESS OF PROFESSIONALISM

As we have seen, the concept of responsibility when applied to office work implies commitment to doing a good job, not just to collecting the pay and benefits associated with it. This concept overlaps, but is not quite the same as, that of "professionalism." Professionalism also implies loyalty to the "job" for its own sake and satisfaction simply from doing it well. Yet the "job" to which the professional is most loyal is the "profession" or "career," not the particular organizational position. Despite this distinction, a strong infusion of "professionalism" in records management departments would doubtless foster the kind of responsibility Penn has demanded. A staff whom we have successfully encouraged to act, dress, and talk in a "professional" manner will manifest the kind of "responsibility" we have been seeking. Moreover, because professionalism implies a willingness to "stand behind what you produce," it is also a helpful antidote to CYA escapism. Surely, selling the ideal of "professionalism" to the staff will not be too difficult, since most of them would like to be considered "professionals."

Unfortunately, two circumstances hamper this solution. My discussion of these circumstances relies heavily upon Michael Pemberton's "Perspectives" columns concerning the records management profession in the RMQ, especially his columns of October, 1991, January and October, 1993, and April, 1994. As Pemberton has pointed out, records management has a number of deficiencies that keep it from being a "real profession," like medicine, law, or engineering. It lacks a significant "literature" and a clear understanding of its intellectual domain. It has no definitive clear statement of the standards of excellence in records management. It has developed a commendable code of ethics, but the ultimate loyalty to a profession, as exemplified by the loyalty of medical doctors to the Hippocratic Oath, is far from being universal among records managers whose loyalty is often to the organization for which they work. Thus, records managers tend to have an organizational, rather than a societal or professional, point of view.

Finally, and perhaps most telling, there is little distinction professionally between the records manager who is pursuing the discipline as a career and the clerical staff, for whom records management is just another job. This lack of distinction between the professional and clerical members of records management is also reflected in the structure of ARMA International, records management's professional organization. Pemberton has argued quite convincingly that records management can never be considered a genuine profession until a clear distinction is made between its professional and non-professional members.

Most would agree with Pemberton that such a distinction is necessary if records managers are to achieve the status of a "real profession," like medicine, law, or engineering. However, the requirement that records managers distance themselves from their clerical staff in order to be considered "professional" ensnares us in another Catch-22:

The ones who most need the infusion of responsibility afforded by "professionalism" are the same clerks who must be clearly categorized as non-professionals if records managers are to achieve professional status.

In other words, in order to make a persuasive argument that records managers should be considered professionals, we must clearly state that records management clerks are non-professionals. Can we really insist that our clerical staff act more "professionally" and at the same time tell them we consider them to be "non-professionals"?

Perhaps there is a way out of this dilemma through studied ambiguity. Although the best long-term strategy for records managers may be to distinguish themselves clearly from their clerical staffs and combine with other "semi-professionals" in the information sciences, this prospect is not on the agenda for the near future. In the meantime, we may as well profit from the ambiguity between professional and nonprofessional reflected in ARMA International, especially the publicity that identifies the Association's membership as "the records management professionals." Encouraging the records management staff to "be professionals" may be indefensible from a strictly sociological point of view, but most of the staff are not sociologists. Consequently, such encouragement can only have a positive effect on their self-images, their productivity, and their sense of responsibility. At least some of them will take us seriously and begin behaving in a manner befitting the status we have bestowed upon them.

Perhaps some will consider this approach Machiavellian or maybe even dishonest. My defense is admittedly pragmatic: Although the clerical staff lacks the education and career aspirations usually associated with professionals, it is hard for me to see great harm in treating them as professionals. Is there not some sense in which those who act like professionals and like to think of themselves as professionals really are professionals? Finally, as Pemberton points out, once records managers do finally achieve unquestioned professional status, their staffs will easily be able to identify themselves accurately as "para-professionals," a self-image that supports the organizational responsibility we need. I am not sure what we will call them: "para-recman" just does not have the same pizzazz as "paramedic" or "paralegal," but maybe it could grow on us.

GIVING MEANING TO THE SUPPORT ROLE

Making a support role glamorous, or at least a marketable item to potential employees, is every bit as challenging as imbuing clerical labor with the aura of professionalism. Indeed, it will be quite some time before the college recruiters are very successful in attracting above-average students to careers like facilities management, records management, or bookkeeping. Nevertheless, many of us who work in these roles believe in the importance-even indispensability--of what we do. It is this belief that we must get across to our staffs. One way of doing this is to have the staff work together to develop a "mission statement" for their function. Some may see this as another excuse for taking a break from the "real" work that has to be done. However, structured discussions on "what is our role and what is required to do it well" can be very valuable in developing a sense of common mission and group pride that is quickly translatable to improved productivity.

One such forum in which I participated involved the financial, administrative, and facilities management departments of our agency. We hired a consultant to meet with representatives of these departments to develop during several afternoon sessions a mission statement for which we all felt a sense of ownership and to which we felt committed. We even came up with an acronym for ourselves: Finance and Administrative Support Team (FAST). (There is something about a clever acronym that seems to make things important and official.) We had periodic FAST meetings and FAST newsletters. To be sure, FAST was never so glamorous as the agency's primary functions, but the development of the FAST mission gave us a sense of worth, self-respect, and belonging-even though we were only a "support" group. DEVELOPING COMMITMENT TO THE ORGANIZATION'S PRIMARY FUNCTION

The support staffs identification with and pride in their support role must be integrated with an appreciation for the primary function they are supporting. After all, they are not going to dedicate themselves to something about which they know nothing. This understanding will come only when they learn at least more about the organization's function than people outside it know. Company newsletters, staff-meeting presentations, "brown-bag" lunch presentations, news briefs posted on electronic or paper bulletin boards are all methods that can help to develop this sense of organizational purpose.

When these communications are successful, employees will begin to feel like "insiders." They will know enough to be able-with maybe a little smugness-to explain to outsiders what the organization is doing and why it is doing it. For example, even though I personally know nothing about engineering, the employee news briefs that are distributed daily about our agency's progress in digging the subway tunnel enable me to hold forth like an expert on "Meet the Press" whenever the topic comes up with friends outside work. For me it is a free ego trip. Moreover, as I do this, I feel the agency becoming my organization.

The shortcoming of such company bulletins is that staff so often ignores them. However, there are several things a records manager can do to encourage staff to pay attention to organization-wide communications. First, the records manager should be very familiar with them herself or himself, and refer to them in casual conversation. Second, a manager can hold meetings to discuss those publications that contain information that immediately affect staff, e.g., items regarding pay or benefits or organizational policy. This is a good time to familiarize staff with these communication channels and how to access them.

Finally, when an organizational project directly impacts what the records management staff is doing, the manager should explain to the staff the whole project-not just the one or two procedural steps in which they are involved. For example, when our agency was discussing the need to raise bus fares, it solicited letters of public opinion. The public definitely had an opinion on paying 30% more for a bus ticket, and we were flooded with mail. I sent the staff a brief memo describing how to identify these lettersand how to microfilm them, index them, and rush copies to three different offices. The staff followed these instructions, but not without some grumbling and not without a few slip ups. How much more effective our role in the project could have been if I had asked a bus operation or public relations manager to make a brief presentation to the staff. They could have explained the need for soliciting public opinion from both a public relations and a legal standpoint, as well as the crucial importance of records management's indexing, microfilming, copying, and distributing the letters.

Times like these are our opportunity to show our staff how what they are doing is critical to the success of the organization's mission. Similar opportunities arise when an emergency request is made for a critical document or large scale litigation support is required. We must remember that, no matter how preoccupied we are in making sure that the request is serviced, we cannot afford to overlook the chance they afford to educate our staff in the organization's mission and how they fit in with it.

INCREASING FUNCTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

When I was still working in the Registrar's Office at Pepperdine University, I appealed to my boss to increase the salaries of some of my staff. I argued that the increase would encourage them to do a better job. Even though it has been almost twenty years, I can still remember his reply:

"We increase salaries for jobs in order to attract better candidates and because it's the right thing to do. You won't get anyone to work harder by offering more money. If you want to get more work out of someone, increase his scope of responsibility-give him more authority."

I am uncertain if that statement is 100% correct in every situation; however, I have found continual validation of the direct relationship between increasing an employee's authority and the amount of effort they are willing to expend. In my own case at Pepperdine, when my jurisdiction was enlarged from "past problems" (whatever that meant) to "academic records and credit evaluation," I immediately began taking work home, arriving at work early, and staying later. Over the years, I have found this is the way most employees respond, when they are entrusted with more authority and a greater charge of functional responsibility.

This reaction makes the managerial tactic of increasing the scope of an employee's job as dangerous as it is powerful. For overworking can be more detrimental to both the employee and the organization than shirking work is. In the example just noted, my boss responded to the sudden increase in my work schedule by insisting that I take a week off and telling me "to work smarter, not harder." If we are not careful to show employees the importance of "working smarter rather than harder," we run the risk of "burning them out." Remember, a more responsible staff will not do the organization much good if they are hospitalized with fatigue and nervous breakdowns.

One way of increasing employees' dedication to the job and their responsibility without overloading them with new duties is to involve them in making decisions about their work. On the one hand, this approach eliminates telling a worker exactly how to do a job step by step-a practice that transforms him into a machine. (Machines are not noted for the kind of responsibility we are attempting to develop.) On the other hand, involving the staff in the decision-making and work design processes avoids the pitfall of uncritically just assigning additional charges and tasks without any preparation. Workers who are just handed a job cold are likely to spend a lot of time making mistakes-i.e., working harder, not smarter. As an added bonus, once staff are involved in decision-making and planning, they become committed to making those decisions and plans work.

DEVELOPING TEAM SPIRIT

One of the most tedious daily jobs in our office is sorting the five or six bags of incoming mail, selecting the five to ten per cent of it that needs to be microfilmed, indexed, and forwarded to the addressees by the second mail run at noon. This is a very demanding job, requiring the ability to identify instantly a wide variety of letters and packages (many of them with no personal or departmental address), to determine whether to microfilm them, and to decide how to index them. The wall in front of the sorting table where all this takes place is literally wall-papered with small, complex notes mostly written in the format:

Index all as and send them to unless , then index them as and send them to , unless ..... .

For the past four years, two women have performed this challenging job as a team. In the beginning, there were complaints that one or other of the myriad of instructions had been overlooked, and the interaction between the two members of the team was not always perfectly smooth. But for the last two years, there have been no complaints, although-as the result of our merger two years agothe volume of mail quadrupled, and the number of exceptions and unique processing instructions increased geometrically. Between them, they have worked out a system that can handle the task even if the volume continues to increase, even when the little notes on their wall are continuously replaced by other little notes with completely different instructions, and even when we tell them they have to make extra copies for everyone we can think of. Their system is seemingly infinitely flexible. It can magically handle whatever comes up. Neither I nor anyone else really understands that "magical," ever-expandable system. The two women designed it themselves! (Perhaps that is the magic.)

They go through the paperwork of requesting vacation time, but it is just a formality. They have already worked out office coverage for their work unit-including lunches, breaks, vacation, and daily arrival and departure times. If one of them gets sick, she calls the other one to make sure she is coming in. If one day, they simply did not come to work, we would not know what to do; the mail would not be processed, and I would be looking for another job. I do not worry about it. They are a team; they are responsible. When you walk in and see them work together, you realize they are responsible because they are a team. There must be explanations of the relationship between team work and responsibility. I do not pretend to understand it, but I do know that it is real and that it is powerful.

CONCLUSION

Ira Penn is correct in asserting that we must convince executive management that, because records management can solve their problems, they should support records management's staff development efforts. It is my contention that records management will be able to convince executive management of its importance by using our current staff-if we are able to elicit responsible performance from them.

There are several obstacles to developing responsible performance:

1 Some employees are interested only in pay, not productivity.

2 The modern office is plagued by the "not my fault" syndrome, in which no one is willing to take responsibility until after the success.

3 The secondary character of support services saps the enthusiasm of those not involved in the primary organizational mission.

4 The so-called "labor-union" mentality which stresses clocking hours rather than productive innovation infects even those organizations without unions.

There are several tools that can be used to overcome these obstacles:

1 Encouraging "professionalism" encourages responsibility as a by-product.

2 Giving meaning to support roles gives staff a reason to be more productive.

3 Developing a commitment to the organization's primary mission gives staff a reason to be responsible.

4 Increasing functional authority and participation in decisionmaking affords a feeling of "ownership" among staff.

5 Developing team spirit is a magic elixir for producing responsible employees.

There is one more tool in eliciting responsible performance that I have only alluded to: The staff we already have wants to be responsible. Most of them really want to do a good job most of the time. It is our job to encourage them to be what deep down inside they already desire.

Copyright Association of Records Managers and Administrators Inc. Apr 1996
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved