Organizing Project No. One

The first large organizing project I took on was in the Human Resources Department of a company. Their files all contained highly confidential personnel information and were in a variety of places -- filing cabinets that did not lock, random boxes shoved all over the place and stacks of papers that needed to be integrated into the filing system.

The first thing I did was have the filing cabinets relocated closer to the HR Dept. into an orderly fashion. I numbered each cabinet and tried to find a key for each lock on the cabinets. I did find several keys and tagged each one with the matching number of the cabinet; the keys were placed in a locking key box that only the HR Dept had access to.

For the cabinets that I could not find keys for, I had a mechanic rig mechanisms for each one enabling a lock to be secured onto it. Then I tagged those keys and stored them in the key cabinet.

With security now in place,I audited each cabinet's drawers to see what the contents were, and with the HR Vice President, developed a theme for each cabinet and/or drawer. Now I could start organizing and rearranging the contents of the drawers, including merging the files that were in random boxes -- about 20 of them -- into the appropriate drawers.

Themes included:
1.  Departed employee personnel files -- these hold confidential info such as social security numbers, salaries, reviews, etc. These are filed alphabetically.
2.  Workers comp files -- these were filed by year but the HR VP wanted them alphabetically, so a complete re-filing had to be completed.
3.  Applicant flow files.

Once the files were organized all in the same place, the HR Dept could easily maintain their paper flow, as well as locate very easily the files they were looking for.