Coping with COVID: Finding the silver lining By Kay Young
2020
has been a year like no other for many, if not all, professionals working in information and records. When national lockdown was announced in March 2020, many had to work from home, where they hadn’t done so before, had to adapt to new enquiries from colleagues and different priorities in their organisation. Thankfully for me, and for my wider team, the FSA was well set up for office staff to switch to home working. We had established policies and processes to support home working; staff had their own laptops and mobile phones, so there was no scrabble to install software on personal devices, we just suddenly found ourselves unable to go into the office. In our directorate, our focus was on ensuring appropriate security measures were in place and providing technical support for colleagues who were not used to a home working setup.
That is not to say that things were easy; many people didn’t have an appropriate work environment and were logging in from their kitchen tables, bedrooms, or sofas. On top of this, people found themselves with different challenges in their personal lives, for example, a supermarket trip taking several hours because of queues; managing childcare whilst trying to work; the impact of the pandemic on their mental health and wellbeing. Staff didn’t always have a very good Internet connection, particularly those who lived in more rural areas. They had to remember to log into the VPN every time they wanted to access our electronic document and records management system (EDRMS). But we adapted, and I’m so proud of my colleagues for continuing to deliver as close to a normal service as we could. And, of course, all of this was going on while the Agency was still working on EU exit! But what of information and records management? What challenges did we face in the way we accessed and shared our information?
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It just so happened that I was finishing up a project in March 2020 to review our information and document management needs, to consider whether our EDRMS was still fit for purpose. Even before COVID, my findings showed that, as an organisation, we needed to work differently, and, having reviewed user needs, we decided that the solution would be SharePoint. The FSA had acquired Microsoft Teams a few years before and was in the process of making the switch from Skype to, “Teams first”, for calls and instant messaging. Helpful for meetings, less helpful for document management, as those who didn’t like our EDRMS found it gave them an alternative place to store their information; even better they could share it so entire teams could start working somewhere else. The official line was that Teams was a collaborative space, but final records needed to be moved to the EDRMS; a baseline retention policy of 2 years across SharePoint was in place, so it was not the place for long-term storage. The same policy is in place in OneDrive, so staff would be unwise to hoard content there
