I was actually discussing this very situation with HR this morning, and had resolved to post my question as soon as I got back to my desk! Thanks very much to TK and all of you for the serendipitous timing and the helpful responses so far.

Our situation is slightly different. We do have policies and procedures in place for what to do with official records when an employee leaves - these records clearly belong to the company, and are dealt with in the same manner as other records. The problem we're running into is with an employee's personal records, and what to do with them when the person leaves. Again, if people know they are leaving, they will generally take time to clean things up a bit, so we're okay there. But I'm wondering what to do when an employee is terminated, and then asks to retrieve personal electronic documents from her desktop.

Technically, these files shouldn't be on the computer at all, since they are clearly not related to work. But we do recognize that everyone has these sorts of things, and that they will generally want to get them back if possible. I'm assuming that we have no actual obligation to return these, but we would like to be able to accommodate the request, within reasonable limits. And here's where it gets really sticky - the employee in question had literally thousands of personal documents on her computer, including photos, her resume, information related to her other job, and so on. The files are too large to burn to a CD and send to her, so if we do accommodate the request, it will mean that someone else has to sit down and sift through all the files and folders to determine what to send and what to ignore.

So my question is, where do you think the "reasonable limits" are in this case? Obviously there is no legal requirement to return anything at all to her, but our position is that termination is stressful enough as it is, and we would like to make things a bit easier if we can. So there must be a happy medium, somewhere between refusing to give back absolutely anything, and pulling the HR manager off her regular job for an entire day to go through everything. We're also looking to manage expectations in case this happens again - if an employee is terminated, what can they reasonably expect will happen to their personal electronic documents?

Thanks very much to everyone - your thoughts and advice are always appreciated!

Cheers,
Megan

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Megan Easto, MISt
Records Management Specialist
Canadian Institute for Health Information
90 Eglinton Ave East, Suite 300
Toronto ON M4P 2Y3
Ph: (416) 481-1616 ext. 3490
www.cihi.ca

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