Top 9 Pandemic Pajama Plan Items:

1. Purge old electronic files.  Have employees purge files from their personal folders or shared folders that are not necessary for company purposes.  The three main records retention classifications include: legally required, operationally required and historically important.  Don’t destroy records that are need for legal or compliance reasons.  Don’t destroy records that are needed to support current transactions or contracts.  Don’t destroy the first ever drawing of a new product.  Give employees some clear instructions of what falls into the various definitions.
2. Purge old emails.  Same story as purging old files.
3. Clean up the directory structure on the network drive.  Rename folders to sort correctly (ie. last name, first name) or to create a perfect match to your core business system.  For instance, include a customer number in addition to the customer name, include a product ID and product name, etc.  Get rid of all folders on the shared drive that are someone’s name, especially if that someone is long gone.
4. Remind all employees not to save files on their local computer drives.  While you are at it, remind them to move those legally required, organizationally required or historically significant documents to the company network drive.
5. Take a survey of all employees and ask what information is hardest to get at now that they are working from home?  Then get a plan together to fix that issue.
6. During your quarterly security awareness training, because I am sure all companies do quarterly security awareness training for all employees, remind them that the CEO\CFO\COO will never ask them via email to wire money to anybody, any time or anywhere.
7. Go through the company CRM and purge old, bad contacts.  Those contacts just create confusion.
8. Confirm the contact information for all customers and vendors in your ERP – delete the rest.
9. Spend 15 minutes a day clicking every single button and menu item and running every report in the most complicated software applications that your company uses so you can see that you won’t break it (stay away from the Delete function).  This will eliminate your fear and turn you into a rockstar.