The backbone of the business

Time stands still for no one, including the administrator. Gone are the days when filing papers, answering phones, and scheduling meetings comprised the bulk of our daily routine.

Today’s administration role has evolved over recent years to include additional responsibilities and advanced skills, the ability to tackle complex tasks, build relationships, deal with conflict and make difficult decisions.

The administrators are truly the backbone of any successful business.

We must be emotionally intelligent leaders, be prepared to take risks, be creative, be team players, represent our managers and departments, and communicate effectively.

In my opinion, the top two qualities that make a great administrator still remain - time management and communication.

As an administrator the one tool that assisted me with time management was creating my “Perfect Week” document. The perfect week is designed to help you be more focused and more productive by grouping key tasks together.

There is no one ‘right’ perfect week, however having a structure and focus on how to set up your time will be one of the keys to you becoming rapidly successful and organised. You may need to come back every three to six months and review your perfect week to ensure that it’s delivering a great result.

You should combine this with regular communication within your team, personal assistants should be meeting either over the phone or face to face every day with their agent. In these meetings you should be working from an agenda, to keep the discussion on track, from this you will most definitely assign action items as you go. Use a shared drive document which will allow you to take notes and once you wrap up the meeting, you won’t need to waste time sending out the notes or assigning action items - they will already be done.

The office administration teams should have weekly or fortnightly meetings and should always attend the office sales meeting. Effective communication can help to foster a great working relationship, which in turn will improve efficiency in the business.

Please feel free to contact me, should you have any questions about building your own “Perfect Week” document or meeting Agenda.