Your business consists of many different functions, and office administration is the glue that holds them all together. A good sense of how to manage an office can help your business run more efficiently. Although office administration can take on a different meaning to each business, here are the basics.
Getting Organized
Creating an organizational system that works for your business and then sticking to it is an important first step in any office.
Filing: Adopt a simple method of filing documents so that finding them later is a simple task. This can be as easy as a collection of labeled file folders or as complex as a solution of creating computer images and storing them electronically.
Calendar: Having a centralized business calendar keeps everyone informed about upcoming events and co-worker availability. An office manager can also help to resolve scheduling conflicts.
Mail: Whether it's mail coming in or mail going out, someone needs to manage it. Sorting, filtering, applying postage, and delivering are all necessary tasks.
Meetings: Organizing meetings goes beyond setting up schedules based on employee constraints. You want to ensure that an adequate meeting space is available, equipment is in good working condition, and water, coffee, or pastries are present when customers come in.
Becoming Efficient
Adopting an efficiency mentality to office administration can have a significant positive impact on your business' operation.
Office Supplies: How many times have you gone to a whiteboard only to spend 5 minutes looking for a marker? Ensuring that office supplies are readily available when needed means your employees spend more time working and less time hunting down supplies. An effective office manager will maintain a small inventory of the most commonly used office supplies and have a procedure for ordering other items.
Workspace: It may seem like a minor detail, but setting up a proper workspace will greatly improve employee productivity. An office manager needs to consider needs of the business and accommodate minor preferences by individual employees.
Creature Comforts: Google was again voted the best place to work by Fortune Magazine. This is largely due to the extra steps they take to ensure that employees don't need to worry about coffee, snacks, lunch, haircuts, dry cleaning, and many other minor items that can distract from productivity. Not every business can afford to do what Google does, but consider adopting a few of these to improve moral and productivity.
Communicating Effectively
Most problems in business can be traced back to a breakdown in communication, and an effective office manager can help change that.
Phones: With more and more businesses adopting automated voice menu systems, talking to a live person can help create a more human connection with the caller. This works best if you can set up different numbers for each aspect of your business, such as sales, customer service, and general inquiries. You'll want to provide extra attention to the sales calls, for example.
Reception: Greeting visitors at your place of business in a professional manner helps establish a good first impression. You want visitors to feel comfortable and relaxed especially if you hope to convert them to customers.
Sharing Information: With business moving seemingly at the speed of light, it can be easy to overlook the importance of communication across departments. An effective office manager will establish mechanisms that facilitate the sharing of information everyone needs to know. This can be as simple as creating and administrating distribution lists in the company's email system to ease the burden of employees remembering exactly who needs to be copied on communications.
Other Office Administration Duties
Depending on the size of your company, office administration may take on additional responsibilities simply because there's no one else available to do them.
Bookkeeping: Many small businesses do not have a dedicated accounting group, so the task of keeping the books balanced falls into the hands of the office manager. Recording invoices, vendor payments, employee paychecks are examples of common tasks in office administration.
Staffing: While the ultimate decision to hire someone rests with the hiring manager, an office manager can streamline this process by filtering resumes, conducting initial phone screens, and setting up internal interviews with prospective candidates.
Equipment Management: Office equipment requires maintenance, and often the office manager ends up handling this task. Whether its fishing arms inside a copy machine looking for a stray sheet of paper or calling in a professional, keeping office equipment running makes life easier for the rest of the employees.