2 How to Promote and Maintain a Filing System
Introducing a filing system requires a lot of energy from every member of staff in the organization. Successful maintenance of this system once established requires every employee's understanding of the system and their consistent effort in observing filing rules.
(1) Good Understanding of a Filing System
Employees must understand why such a filing system is necessary. The system itself must be perceived as useful and deserving of their efforts to maintain it.
(2) Observing Filing Rules
Once it becomes operational, an employee must observe the rules of the filing system. Any small discrepancy in this area may mean that other employees are unable to retrieve the documents they require and the whole system will lose credibility as a result. If this should happen, more and more people will not make any effort to follow the rules and there is a possibility that the whole system will collapse as a result.
(3) Disposing of Documents
It is important that documents, no longer of use, are disposed of regularly to maintain the filing system. Individual members of staff and the organization as a whole, should check all documents in current use that have not yet been filed on a regular basis(at least every six months). One method of checking documents is to sort them out into three categories; ones to be disposed of, ones to be returned to the place or person they belong and ones to be filed. A rule of thumb when it comes to indecision on whether or not to dispose of a document is to go ahead and dispose of it anyway. In most cases, someone else has a copy of the document. If any doubt exists as to whether or not it is necessary to keep it, it can't be particularly valuable to begin with.
Most government organizations have official regulations which stipulate how long each document is to be kept according to the nature of its contents. Generally, the term is fixed uniformly without any real necessity for keeping the documents. The period of time for which a document must be kept should be reviewed every couple of years, and the necessity for preserving it at all questioned in the process.
In the case of an electronic filing system in a computer network, people tend to pay little attention to the disposal of documents since they don't occupy any physical space. It is essential, however, to dispose of all unnecessary information, even in an electronic filing system, for efficient retrieval.
