By Siobhan King |
October 24, 2025
Three ways to drive records retention in the workplace
As part of our autumn focus on records management, Siobhan King, Senior Consultant at Metataxis, shares three top tips to encourage efficient data retention in the workplace.
1.
Explain the different drivers for retention
Explain to colleagues that retention schedules are shaped by both what the law requires and what the business requires.
This may be disappointing news to those who prefer a hard and fast answer on how long things should be kept encoded in law. But business value is the biggest conversation to have with stakeholders. If people understand the basic principle of assigning a business value up front, the rest of the conversation will get a lot easier.
2.
Talk about business processes
A top concern around retention management is that retention rules mean records get deleted before the end of a business process.
Projects are a classic example of this. Stakeholders might see a retention period of, say 6 years, and fear that records related to projects that run for decades will be deleted before the project has ended. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce retention triggers and the need to identify when the business process ends. This can be followed up with a discussion about how long records are needed after the business process ends.
3.
Balance organisational interests with data subject rights
If stakeholders are managing personal data, they may already know they need to manage this in line with GDPR. This stakeholder group is probably the most frustrated to learn that the GDPR doesn’t tell us exactly how long we can keep personal data but uses slightly evasive legal terms such as “legitimate purpose” and “reasonable” which can be somewhat subjective.
Sometimes, you may have to tell stakeholders that the period of time they propose to keep personal data is unreasonable, such as 20 years for former customers. It may be classed as unreasonable because there is no legitimate business reason to keep things that long or because it’s a real outlier in terms of industry practice.
Conversely, you may need to reassure stakeholders that it is perfectly acceptable to retain certain types of personal data for a long time because it protects the rights of the organisation, and more importantly, it protects the rights of the data subjects themselves (for example, records which provide proof of ownership, benefits conferred, or qualifications conferred
Get to grips with records retention
Here at Metataxis, we have many years’ experience writing and implementing retention schedules. Take a deeper dive into Why Records Management Matters and read more about our information and records management services.
