During my years spent travelling and working as a temp admin assistant/office manager, I regularly reported to an unprepared supervisor, and recieved unclear directions about what to do. I always had a lot of questions and it wasn’t always clear who to ask, so I spent a lot of time figuring stuff out myself.
The main thing I learned was how undervalued admin work usually is.
Businesses try to keep costs low in every area they can, but they waste so much money in careless admin practices.
Admin staff are often temporarilly employed and/or poorly paid, so they don’t always have the institutional knowledge (or incentive) to contribute meaningfully, beyond just following instructions.
They’re also often poorly supervised – usually as an add-on task for another manager, who doesn’t give the work the focus that it needs. Mistakes and poor practices get embedded without anyone noticing that they’re not serving their purposes.
An admin assistant is in an ideal position to see this close up. The right admin assistant is very valuable, and should be respected (and compensated) accordingly.
During my years in that role, I saw a lot of unforced errors – hugely expensive poor decisions, or everyday procedures that wasted so much of everybody’s time, every day. Like the team that needed to keep using two database programs, constantly copying data from one to the other, because each one did one important thing, but neither did both, and one of them was so expensive they weren’t able to replace it yet.
This is the first in a series which there is (unfortunately) no end of material for. Stay tuned!