This is not a political post, I promise!

There are some lessons to be learned from the FBI no longer having access to five months worth of text messages between two staff members who were investigating former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business and the issue of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election, and Mrs. Clinton’s use of that private email server for sending classified and non-classified information. The one lesson I will discuss here is a simple one: you should not archive your email and texts.

More accurately, you, as an employee of your company, government agency or non-profit organization, should not archive your own email and texts.

Archiving should be based on pre-established and evolving corporate policy, not your choice of what content to save and what to discard. If your emails, texts, social media posts, files and other electronic content contain business records or any other content that is relevant to retain, it should be retained and archived automatically based on a set of corporate policies that have been established and approved by senior management, legal counsel, compliance, finance and any other stakeholders that are focused on the best interests of the enterprise. You, as an employee, should be involved in that process, but only as a voice among many in determining what to retain — you should not be the one who makes the final decision about what gets archived and what is discarded.

The reason for this is a simple one: there may be incriminating evidence, like mistakes or downright malicious activity in an email or text, that an individual might want to hide from the view of others. Someone responding to an email might mistakenly delete an important business record buried deep in the thread of an email that he or she did not see. Someone might fire off a text message or social media post in anger that reflects poorly on a client or colleague. In short, there is a temptation to delete information that violates corporate policy and we, as employees, should not have the ability to delete information in an attempt to cover that violation. While it might benefit us in the short term, it harms the organization in the long term.

In short, any good archiving process should prevent employees from being the key arbiter on what gets archived and what doesn’t.