More than compliance: Email archiving and employee turnover

Most companies typically think of email archiving solutions as helping to mitigate cost and risk - namely:

• Reduce compliance risk by automatically retaining emails for regulations, records management policies and/or legal holds
• Reduce e-Discovery cost by allowing legal staff to search, refine and review emails and attachments, eliminating the need for expensive backup and laptop restores, data processing services and attorney review time
• Reduce storage and backup time and cost by giving the user a scalable, Unlimited Mailbox without clogging up the primary email system

This post is the beginning of a series of blog entries on how email archiving "in the cloud" can allow companies to drive business value, not just reduce cost and risk.

As a CEO, I always think about cost and risk but frankly even higher up on my agenda are things like:

• Improving client satisfaction
• Driving sales growth
• Enhancing employee satisfaction and productivity

On that third point, most CEOs specifically struggle with questions like the following:

1. How do I retain my talented employees?
2. When employees leave (and some will), how do I retain their knowledge for the company?
3. How do I transition this knowledge to their replacements so I can on-board them quickly?

As we all know now, email has become our filing cabinet or, in more modern terms, our "data warehouse" for all of our unstructured information. As such, it is a curse (if not managed) or a blessing (if properly controlled) with respect to employee turnover.

The curse is the way things normally work:

• Employee leaves
• Employee takes PST/NSF (personal archive) files with all old email from company
• Employer loses intellectual property and knowledge
• If employee goes to competitor, things could be even worse
• New employee taking over job has to start from scratch
• What were our latest interactions with clients?
• What promises did we make internally?
• What did last year's proposal look like so I don't have to start over?
• Sales cycles slow, customer satisfaction is damaged and employees themselves struggle

With an email archive, companies can:

• Prevent employees from taking their email with them (by disabling the need for PST creation and giving employees an Unlimited Mailbox in corporate control, rather than islands of "underground archives" in the form of PST/NSF files)
• Preserve knowledge and IP in company control during inevitable employee turnover
• Transition the information to the new employee by giving him/her access to the archive (or a subset) from the employee whom she or he is replacing