Building an Improved Model Of Applied Recordkeeping

Looking back from 2025, it's clear that IM technology implementations have consistently failed to deliver on their promises, not due to technical shortcomings, but because of a critical oversight: the human element.

While organizations invest heavily in sophisticated platforms and systems, they consistently underestimate the psychological and cultural barriers that determine whether staff will actually use these tools effectively. This shortage of focus on employee psychology and workplace culture has been the key ingredient missing from successful information management transformations, with most efforts limited to basic training on new technology rather than addressing the fundamental behavioral changes required for sustainable recordkeeping practices.

The Problem with Traditional Training Approaches

For example, employees arrive at the training session, delivered online and many just do their regular work while the Trainer delivers the material because the participants aren't fully invested and engaged, which isn't the Trainer's fault. Its largely due to a poor workplace culture that believes records aren't important.

Organisational psychology, which is the study of human behaviour in business that focuses on applying psychology principles to improve workplace effectiveness and employee well-being needs to be fully engaged to truly empower the workforce.

Traditionally this is done from the top down in an organisation from Management, Human Resources or Change Transformation teams. However by also engaging this from the bottom up as well with psychology tools such as 'job crafting' an organisation can meet halfway to rapidly change workplace culture.

Addressing this as a first priority to build a good recordkeeping workplace culture is a must. While technology plays its part, its still too heavily relied upon as the focal element at the expense of the people factor being organisational psychology.

Learning from Environmental Behaviour Change

Humans can change behaviour when fully engaged and motivated with belief in the outcome. Our parklands used to be practical useable with dog owners not picking up their pooch's waste and people used to place all household waste into a single landfill bin. Enough people changed and believed in a better way and now environmental outcomes are vastly improved.

Changing the workplace culture to 'move the dial' from a poor recordkeeping culture to good one is possible too. Psychology and specifically organisational psychology has the means to influence a good recordkeeping culture for most employee's behaviour but it is more a marathon than a sprint.

The Power of Job Crafting

Job crafting is one proven method that can open employee thinking around self, task or relations to allow them to redesign their work to make it more meaningful to them and their team. This increases their satisfaction, commitment and enjoyment of their job. But it can't just come from top-down thinking, so we need to engage lower-level employees and build up towards the top to make significant change.

Comparing 1985 to 2025: A Step Backwards?

While 1985 recordkeeping had limited technology by today's standard with records mostly on paper and microfilm media and over a century of repeated work practice to 'keep a copy' now appear to be quite comprehensive compared to 2025. In 1985 though we were just told that it's done this way and we mostly did it.

The record creation 'digital genie' escaped the bottle in the 1990's and is still loose today. So, the challenge now for us as a profession is do we still have the fight to take on the apathy towards us and present an improved applied model of recordkeeping to our organisation and individual employees? One that helps re-capture the 'digital genie' and return them to the bottle of comprehensive compliant recordkeeping?

So, in conclusion, over the past four decades, the evolution from paper-based to digital work environments has dramatically changed the nature of records creation and capture, yet Information Management practice has struggled to keep pace.

The Failure of Traditional Models

While traditional models like the lifecycle and continuum provided structured approaches to managing information, they were built on assumptions that no longer hold true in decentralised, digital workplaces where records are inconsistently created, poorly contextualised, and often never captured at all.

Technology has enabled data proliferation but undermined recordkeeping coherence, with critical business decisions increasingly undocumented or lost in fragmented systems. This disconnect demands a fundamental shift, from systems-based IM thinking to human-centred, behavioural approaches that focus on the psychology of recordkeeping.

The Blueprint for Sustainable IM Culture

To build a sustainable IM culture, organisations must move beyond technical solutions and invest in workplace culture change, engaging staff at all levels, embedding IM into workflows, and reframing recordkeeping not as a 'tick-box' exercise, but as a vital enabler of evidence-based decision making.

Just as society changed its behaviours to improve environmental outcomes, so too can workplace behaviours shift, if the profession embraces organisational psychology as the key to revitalising modern recordkeeping practice.

This is part of a five part-blog series by Stephen Clarke MRIM, CSRIM and David Robinson. This blog series is based on the article "Future Ready? Information Management Needs a Makeover," which was first published in Volume 41 (May 2025) issue of iQ - The RIMPA Global Quarterly Magazine of the Records and Information Management Practitioners Alliance (RIMPA).