Gone are the days when office manager roles evolved solely around ordering office supplies and keeping the space clean. This role has recently seen a major shift to tasks encompassing safety, happiness, retention, amongst others. There’s no doubt that the coronavirus pandemic has put further responsibilities and stress on office managers. If you’re a struggling office manager, these tips can help you improve efficiency.
1. Improve your problem-solving
As an office manager, excellent problem-solving skills are vital to ensure the smooth running of the business. The best way to gain such a skill is via experience. Problem-solving skills accumulate over time; thus, as the years unravel, you’ll find that you rely less on the help of senior members when implementing initiatives.
Being innovative means coming up with new ideas that can improve the efficiency of yourself and other members of staff. You might be required to develop a tight budget that fits your current resources or work with the team to introduce an enterprise call center to increase customer satisfaction and staff productivity.
2. Have top-notch organization skills
Two of the top skills every office manager needs are time management and organization. This goes beyond creating a new filing system for workers and ensuring tax return envelopes are never out of stock during tax season. As an office manager, you’re meant to know both just your schedule and others.
This means you need to be organized to a fault to adequately juggle the day-to-day business processes of the workplace, coworkers, 3rd party suppliers, and long-term business plans. Without organization and time management skills, you’ll have a lot of work piling up within a short amount of time, which can be overwhelming.
3. Study bookkeeping basics
As an office manager, you’re responsible for looking after the company’s budget, payroll and looking after the numbers of all other departments. This will require a high knowledge in bookkeeping to ensure all departments within the company are adhering to their budgets and keeping track of all expenditures. Thanks to technological advancement, you can be proficient in dozens of bookkeeping software to help with your tasks.
4. Be a great communicator
To thrive in such a huge office management role, good communication skills always give you the upper hand when resolving conflict, avoiding mistakes, and giving directions to coworkers. This skill is imperative because the office manager is one of the few who communicates with everyone, no matter their position. It lets you know the best way to approach a c-class executive, and a new employee, without making any feel more or less important.
5. Develop great negotiation skills
With the right negotiation skills, any office manager can work wonders. This position comes with many different roles, with resource management being one of them. As an office manager, you have to take care of all office budgets, ensuring there’s no over expenditure. You’re also responsible for larger budgets used for company events and conferences. For such budgets, you need to make the most of the resources available to you to help maximize their value. This will mean negotiating with suppliers on store prices for certain items and service fees.
Negotiation is also great when keeping the peace within the office during a conflict. Offices are made of people of all backgrounds, with different temperaments, characters, and expectations. This means there’s always the likelihood of heads clashing from time to time. As an office manager, your negotiation skills should help you and the human resources team find creative solutions that parties involved can benefit from.
To conclude. Being an office manager means always giving off your best when doing your work and overseeing the output of all other team members. This can be tough, especially when everything promises to go awry. Rest assured, with the above tips, you can still find the balance you need to help improve your efficiency in and out of the workplace.