This is an unfortunate (and all-too-common) reality these days.

Ideally, at bare minimum, make sure that your facilities group tells
you who owns the records (hopefully, at the person level, but at least
at the business unit / department / cost center level). If you charge
back for storage, that ongoing cost for storing a business unit's junk
will add up.

In some organizations, the responsibility for reviewing and purging
abandoned records should lie with the employee's manager -- and if you
can get that made as policy, it gives you and facilities some leverage
to get this stuff cleaned up.

You can also provide some guidelines to Facilities. You don't want them
sweeping up every trinket and coffee cup -- just the records. If you
can get them to weed out books and magazines, office supplies, personal
items, and trinkets, that's a big plus for you. You also want them to
try and get the files into some order (at a minimum, all the file
labels facing the same way -- up!) and not stuff the boxes full. Make
sure they know how to label the boxes.

Ideally, you'll have a records designate in each cost center. In a
perfect world, that listing will be complete and accurate, but in times
of change, that's not always possible. If you can get those folks to
work with Facilities before the stuff comes to you, great. If not,
they'll need to come and visit you to poke through the boxes. At bare
minimum, they hopefully know the RIFed individual and what they were
doing.

At some point, you'll have a collection of miscellaneous stuff to sort
through. If you can be somewhat front-end proactive (making sure that
all the emphemera and personal items get tossed as you accession the
boxes), then the volume of junk you have to wade through will be
reduced. You should be able to do a quick eyeball inventory of the
contents of each box upon receipt. Later on, you'll need to deal with
the boxes that records designates and managers can't figure out for
you.

Patrick Cunningham, CRM

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