Administrative Support
Administrative support example: It is 8:50 AM and you just arrived at your desk for work.
Your manager is waiting for you with a concerned look on his or her face and asks,
“Is the sales report ready? I have to present it to the senior management team at 9:00 AM!”
You hesitate before you respond. Then you say, “I thought the meeting was tomorrow.”
You can imagine how the conversation goes from there. Welcome to the Administrative Support Skills.
Having effective administrative skills are essential in today’s work environment.
Being organized, punctual, and effective in your communication skills, both written and verbal are crucial if you want to achieve your goals in any endeavour you pursue.
Think about it.
The current business environment is filled with many sources of information,
and you have to take that information and analyze it, prioritize it, and process it to the extent where value is achieved for the organization.
Good administrative skills reduce the risk of “things falling through the cracks.” Great administrative skills create exponential results that spot potential problems, overcome obstacles, and leverage resources effectively.
In this course, Administrative support will teach the core skills that will help you use your resources efficiently, manage your time wisely, communicate effectively, and collaborate with others skillfully.
The practices presented in this module will take time to root into your daily work routine.
However, making the commitment to consistently apply the concepts every day is the key to changing and adopting new behaviours in a short amount of time.
Administrative support: Dealing with Email
Email is one of the largest sources of information you will have to deal with on a daily basis.
Email is a useful tool if handled properly.
It is common practice for an administrative assistant to be in charge of their manager’s email inbox.
This means you, as an assistant, have monitor twice as much email,
and typically managers tend to have more emails than regular employees.
Although having emails make communication much easier, it does present some issues when it comes to organizing. Determining which emails are important or should be deleted places you in the position of making decisions for both you and you manager.
You cannot approach you manager to ask if this email is important or not.
That is why you are there. To have a technique that enables you to process emails systematically, allows for faster decision-making and organizing.
Below is a quick and easy technique you should use to process emails more effectively.
Keeping Track of the Paper Trail
Even in our electronic age, we still have to contend with paperwork.
You may receive letters from customers, invoices, or contracts. Being an assistant, you will need to manage and keep track of all the paper work that is circulating around your desk.
Often times, you will need to act on the paper work and send it to other departments like accounting.
Other times you may need to produce a report and have it ready on a certain day for your manager.
Having an organized method of tracking your paper work at your desk helps to reduce missed deadlines and lost paper work.
A good practice is to create a filing system, using either a tradition file cabinet at your desk or a Pendaflex folder.
The strategy here is to stage out the paperwork over the course of the week.
You will need an inbox, five folders for each day of the week, a folder for next week’s work, outbox and a red rush folder.
Place inbox in a conspicuous area on your desk.
Review the paper work in the inbox and determine what day you intend to work on the item.
Place the item in the corresponding day of the week.
If you determine it does not need to be done this week, place it in the Next Week’s folder.
As you process the work each day, either file the documents you do not need to send out or place the document in the Outbox for sending in the mail or interoffice system. Click Here To Learn More!
