Christmas admin elf As you’ll remember from last year’s festive testimonials, we’re like this (picture us crossing our fingers closely) with Santa and his crew. Well, actually we’ve only met the big man a couple of times; we mostly deal with his elves. But that’s not a bad thing. Honestly, Saint Nick is more of a brand ambassador these days – it’s the admin elves who do the real work (don’t tell him we said so though, he’s got a very fragile ego).

Anyway, here’s how operations are run at Christmas Towers, and the lessons you can learn from these busy little guys when it comes to organising your office administration.

You can’t make naughty or nice lists like you used to

GDPR. They’re feeling the impact up there in the North Pole. Up until last year it was simple – Santa made his list, he checked it twice and he found out whether people were naughty or nice.

This year his elves have had to undertake a massive project to gain consent to hold data on the world’s 1.9 billion children. They also had to go through historic records and destroy any data collected under the old rules which would contravene the news ones.

Luckily we were able to help them by securely destroying several thousand boxes of these lists using our special cross shredding and pulping service. No one will be using your childhood indiscretions against you now, you can be sure of that.

Scanning invoices creates a lot more room for making toys

You’d think that with the price of land up north, Christmas Towers would be vast and spacious. But it’s surprisingly cramped. When we first visited (and no, we can’t tell you where it is or share photos – we had to sign an NDA) we were literally tripping over bags of reindeer feed and boxes of old receipts for elf-sized carpentry tools, baker’s sugar and string.

We couldn’t help them with the reindeer feed, but we did sort the receipts for them. Thankfully they were able to let us use Santa’s sleigh to get all the boxes back home (usually we’d take them off in one of our vans but they struggle a little in those rather extreme arctic conditions). We scanned them all, created a searchable database so they can retrieve any of them at the touch of a button, then securely destroyed the hard copies, which they said they didn’t need anymore (otherwise we’d have stored them here, obviously).

Don’t rely on a reindeer temp to find the right archive box

This is strictly between us, but there was a right royal screw up last year when several of the elves were signed off with tinsel blindness at the same time and the office ended up seriously understaffed. Unfortunately, this group included the only three elves who understood the document  storage system. So when the head chef wanted the original candy cane recipe from the archives (he was going through a bit of a ‘back to basics’ period, apparently) they dispatched a reindeer who was acting as temporary cover to find it. Naturally he hadn’t a clue where to start, upset several boxes of old files, got hopelessly lost and ultimately did not deliver said recipe. Which caused Chef to have a hissy fit of epic proportions and storm off muttering something about amateurs. It was all very Gordon-Ramsay-does-Christmas.

This year, they’ve relocated their archive to our Bridgwater storage unit – not only to create even more space, but because our barcoding system means we can easily find anything they’re looking for and either send a scanned copy straight across or courier a hard copy to them within 24 hours (assuming the snow isn’t too heavy out their way).

So there you have it. Lessons in life and business from the festive folks way up North. Happy Christmas one and all!

PS In the interest of full disclosure we should probably point out that Santa isn’t actually a client of ours. This is just a bit of festive fun, ok? We do provide data destruction, document storage, document scanning and a number of other services that would be useful to admin elves if they existed. If you could use one or more of these services, give us a call and we’ll see how we can help. Unfortunately we can’t actually supply you with an admin elf.