11 March 2008 - Scotland Group Meeting
Promoting Records Management in Your Organisation
Records Management Society - Scotland Group Meeting, Tueday 11th March 2008
University of Aberdeen, Linklaters room, Aberdeen
Meeting report
The meeting was opened by Edith Pringault-Adam and Jennifer Sewel, Senior Policy Advisor within the Policy, Planning and Governance Service at the University of Aberdeen welcomed the Group.
The event focused on promoting records management and the delegates listened to presentations from experienced public speakers (Toastmasters), corporate communications, and to witness experiences from records managers.
The first speaker was Matthews Mtumbuka, of Aberdeen Toastmasters, who spoke about the fundamentals of getting comfortable with public speaking, and provided advice to the group on how to speak effectively in public, using examples from his own experience.
Matthews identified the 5 phases vital to effective public speaking as:
- Preparation; objectives, what needs to be delivered, gather information, select your content and prepare an outline of the presentation.
- Scripting; structure is the main focus, opening must grab attention with a smooth transition to the main topic. This is made up of main points, each with their own supporting content, following on to the conclusion, which sums up. Most importantly the presentation must be actionable, encouraging the audience to go out and do something about what they've just heard.
- Practising; builds confidence and credibility, clarifies ambiguous statements, eliminates over-reliance on notes and smoothens transitions.
- Delivery; check the venue and the equipment, have back up plans if the technology goes wrong, focus on verbal and non-verbal communication.
- Evaluation; feedback is important, get this from the audience. Feedback provided should be specific, focusing on the positives while including areas for improvement. Remember it is not a judgement, only an opinion.
This was followed by a demonstration of ''How to speak in public'' from fellow Aberdeen Toastmasters, David Thomson presenting, with Eric Dalhuijsen evaluating his performance. After this, the delegates were spilt into groups, and each delivered a 5-minute presentation to their group. Their peers then evaluated the performances, using the tips gained from the experience of Aberdeen Toastmasters. All groups then fedback their presenting experiences to the rest of the attendees.
Before the morning session devoted to speaking in public ended, Matthews and the other members of Aberdeen Toastmasters provided information on how to join Toastmasters, providing details of clubs within Glasgow, Edinburgh, Findhorn, Dundee, as well as Aberdeen, and also links to the Toastmasters website.
The afternoon session began with a presentation from Steven Winetrobe, Records Manager at Scottish Water on promoting records management within your organisation. Steven's presentation concentrated on how he and his team were able to promote awareness of the records management through word of mouth, posters, newsletters, and promotional items such as calendars featuring Bobby the Box.
The emphasis in his experience was on grabbing attention, adding some humour, and advertising the services you provide to the people who want to use you, but don't know about you yet. Steven praised the benefits of open days, inviting users in to see the records from the point of view of the records manager. He advised that once users had visited the record management service then they had a better understanding of the issues involved and were therefore more responsive to the rules laid out by the RM staff.
The second witness experience came from Heather Jack, Director of HJBS Ltd. She began her presentation by describing the importance of tailoring your promotion of records management to different users, and the need to change your pitch accordingly.
She advised that those within senior management who have the money to invest, and the clout to make it happen will require a different pitch to staff throughout the organisation whose buy-in is essential to make records management a success in practice.
For promoting records management to senior management, Heather advised the following; do your research, find out what is pertinent to them, find out the legislation which affects their area and relate this to RM, find the trends and issues within their organisation which they will relate to.
For staff throughout the organisation Heather advised it is helpful to have workshops, one-to one sessions, conduct user surveys to get a good picture of how your service is currently being used, and consider ways to improve this for your users.
Heather also advised engaging with Human Resources, bringing them awareness of file plans and naming conventions, and seeking to have RM as a part of induction training for staff. Heather finished her presentation by reminding the Group that the best way to promote records management was through engaging with others within your organisation, delivering customer satisfaction and providing regular updates to users on your services and improvements made.
The next presentation was from Kate Bond, Corporate Communications Manager, Aberdeenshire Council, who spoke about achieving your aims through effective internal communications.
She began by stating that it was important to listen to staff, get their feedback, and act on their suggestions where possible, as this is the most important way to engage people in what you are trying to achieve.
Kate gave examples of barriers to communication; the ''silo mentality'', lack of face to face briefings to staff, lack of commitment from senior management, no evaluation of performance were amongst these.
Kate gave examples of approaches that are unlikely to be effective;
- One off blasts of information without the context, eg. blanket emails to all staff without providing the background to why they are being targeted.
- Avoid jargon, write in a way which can be understood by anyone at any level within the organisation, communications should be understood by those who do not know anything about the subject.
Kate also provided a list of effective means for communicating your message to staff;
- Team meetings, allows information to cascade to every level of the organisation.
- Keep records management stories interesting, and ensure they are relevant to your audience.
- Keep your message simple; keep repeating it.
- What's in it for me? Show your audience what effective RM will do for their working environment.
- Advertise your services on payslips, getting out to everyone within the organisation.
- Promote records management on notices, beside the water cooler, put posters in the loos anywhere people will stop and read what you want to say.
And finally Kate advised;
Know what you want to achieve with your communications, and measure how successful you are, and speak to your corporate communications team, getting them to advise you on effective ways of getting your message across within your organisation.
After the presentations, the delegates split into groups to explore promoting records management within their organisations.
Following feedback from all groups, Edith Pringault-Adam, Chair of the RMS Scotland Group then provided an update on the activities of the RMS, and outlined dates for the diary for the coming year including proposed meetings for 2008, and their themes.
Date: April 14th (2pm-5pm)
Scottish Public Information Forum Event
Venue: Scottish Parliament Building, Edinburgh
Subject: Freedom of Information s.61 Code of Practice Revision
Date: June 17th (all day event)
Venue: Dundee
Subject: business mapping, classification schemes, file plans
Date: June 24th (all day event)
EDRM in Practice (Scotland) One day Conference
Venue: Edinburgh First Conference Centre, University of Edinburgh
Subject: EDRM in Practice, planning for EDRM in the long term
Date: September 30th (all day event)
Venue: Edinburgh, to be confirmed by chair of Society of Archivists Scotland Region, joint meeting
Subject: standards and long-term preservation
Edith reported back to the delegates present her meeting with the Scottish Council on Archives, which also covers Records Management. Currently the organisation has no proper funding, and is intending to lobby hard for archives legislation. Edith appealed to the Group to write to their MSP to being attention to these issues. Edith also reported to the Group that the Scottish Records Advisory Council, was no longer in existence.
Edith advised the members of the Group that registration for the Records Management Society Conference was now almost full, and requested volunteers to come along to the RMS Scotland gathering In the Sheraton Hotel, at 4pm on Sunday 20th April, to welcome other delegates to the conference. She also urged all members who would be attending the RMS conference to attend the Annual General Meeting.
Edith then made an appeal to the delegates attending the meeting, that the RMS were looking for suitable venues throughout Scotland in which to hold an event. The venue would be required to hold up to 70 people for a typical full-day event.
Alison Mackenzie proposed the vote of thanks to all speakers, the Policy, Planning and Governance Service from the University of Aberdeen for providing the venue and to OpenText for sponsoring the event and providing catering.
 |
Acrobat Reader is a helper application manufactured by Adobe Systems Incorporated that lets you view and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Click the button to download Acrobat Reader from the Adobe website. |
 |