My husband is a busy man. He works as a political consultant; he teaches political science at not one but three colleges (not necessarily all three in the same semester); and seasonally, in his so-called spare time, he functions as a part-time baseball scout.
With all this going on, he lives and dies by his laptop. It contains his client files and records, his lecture notes, the first draft of the textbook he's writing, all his contact information, and countless other necessities. Despite this, he's very bad about making backups. So you can imagine the problems it caused him when his computer crashed a couple of weeks ago. It took the data recovery people five days to download all the files he had stored on that machine. The state of the hard drive was responsible for part of that, but part of it was the sheer number of files. He's been driving himself crazy trying to recreate the data and the records that he needed for the last several days, including a presentation he had to make to a client the day before the data recovery people returned his data.
Watching everything he was going through, and trying to help as best I could, I starting thinking about how much data we are responsible for handling in HR, and how much of it is starting to be stored electronically. Our main personnel files are stored in the HRIS. We keep electronic copies of W-4s, I-9s, benefit enrollment forms, and beneficiary forms.
It's very important that there be easily accessible backup copies. About 15 years ago, when electronic systems were still relatively new, my then-employer pulled together a team to update the computer system, which included not only a rudimentary HRIS, but some payroll information, and a fair amount of client information, as well. I could not, then or now, be considered a techie, but they still had me travel to the regional office, several states away, to learn the new system for when my own branch was upgraded. All in all, the team consisted of five people from a total of four different offices located in three states. We were to travel after hours on Thursday, install the upgrade Friday and Saturday, and return home on Sunday so that we could be at work Monday.
Friday morning, there was a thunderstorm that knocked out power to the area, and a poorly functioning surge protector allowed the main server to be fried when the power came back on. "No problem," said the resident techie. "I'll get the backup disks from the safe deposit box." He did, only to find that the last backup had not taken properly. We not only had to install the upgrade, but we had to recreate two months' worth of information, as well. We worked 14-hour days Friday and Saturday and a 10-hour day Sunday; those of us from out of state stayed over to work on Monday, and we left with the system not yet operating. This is a problem that could have been avoided had the person who did the last monthly backup (only days before the thunderstorm) had checked to see if it took.
I just can't make myself believe in the paperless office. If space is a problem, and I know that for most of us it is, keep backups in some way, shape, or form that you can easily get to. Whether IT backs up the HRIS on tape once a week, or you print a hard copy of the employment handbook off the intranet and tuck it into your desk drawer; whether you scan copies of the I-9s and W-4s onto a CD, or copy the employee files onto microfiche and keep them in the safe, don't leave yourself without backup data files for more than a couple of hours. It's just not worth the trouble.
Catherine Bannon is an HR consultant in Marshfield, MA (catherine.bannon@gmail.com). Bannon worked for 10 years in HR management before starting her consulting practice.
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