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0:00 [Music] foreign [Music] hello everybody it's Hannah Gray here founder and CEO of the office Management Group and I'm going to take you through another session today on what is an office manager we did one a little while ago well a couple of years ago now actually on what is office management and that was a live webinar that we shared with members of our online platform the office management portal and if you're not a member of that platform yet I really encourage you to join it it's free and there is so many resources on there www.theofficemanagementportal.com anyway
0:46 back to today it inspired me because of how popular that has been to create some more series for you and today as I said we're going to focus on what is an office manager now the role of an office manager has grown in popularity over the years and there's some stats on this um which are quite staggering when you look at the growth from a number of years ago on LinkedIn to now and um these professions are given new responsibilities at a moment's notice the role evolves and changed changes constantly and with thanks to covid and this whole new way of working that we're all still getting used to it is Shifting again this session we're going to cover what being an office manager is and what it
1:32 means for your business and how the role of the office manager has evolved and is continuing to do so so what is office management well according to Wikipedia office management is a profession involving the design implementation evaluation and maintenance of the process of work within an office or other organization in order to sustain and improve efficiency and productivity and they go on to say that office management is thus an overall part of the administration of a business and since the elements of management are forecasting and planning organizing command control and coordination the office is a part of the total management function and therefore
2:18 as is the office manager quite a long-winded way of explaining what an office manager is or what office management is I have made it slightly more succinct and I detail it as office managers are responsible for ensuring a healthy safe and effective working environment with minimum disruption for all staff clients and contractors now I often look at these roles and see the staff as my clients as well but when you're looking at it in this sense very typically we're talking about your external clients or visitors that are coming into your office space then your contractors that are coming in to do works and work with you as well as then clearly the people working in your office staff or contractors who are contract staff
3:07 um this tend to the people and tend um and they will tend to the business quote by John Maxwell you have probably seen this before and it's often a quote used for people in senior management positions and it is spot-on relevant here for office managers and the reason I say that is because we very much are part of this tending to the business in our roles we tend to every level of business we interact with every level of employee either virtually or face to face every single day and as office cultures around the world continue to expand and shift the significance of our roles as office managers will continue to increase so what is the main difference to
3:54 Facilities Management we're often asked this now to me a facilities manager typically and traditionally is someone who is looking after the hard and soft services within a building so they would normally look after a tenanted building and kind of the Box element as that of that as I call it so they would work either on behalf of the building manager or the landlord looking after those hard and soft services for example the air conditioning cleaning security Waste Management the mechanical and electrical pieces within that building and perhaps you know reception security staff and systems and so on as part of that as well what's happened is that over the years people have begun to call office managers who sit within tenanted
4:41 parts of those buildings are you working directly for the business within those buildings as facilities managers and that works where you have a much bigger role and you are pretty much just dealing with facilities however in most roles when you are looking after facilities and then HR accounts um you know payroll all sorts of things contracts procurement event management culture well-being health and safety there is much more to your role I believe than being facilities manager they do though and as I say here the two are very often blended and mean one in the same thing in most workplaces but to me if you're looking at them traditionally that is the split office manager has a much wider range of
5:27 responsibilities compared to um the typical facilities manager role as I say because they're doing all these extra things for the business and then some um yeah facilities managers may also look at additional areas or look after and what is the difference to assistant roles because again so many people are in hybrid positions where they're both an executive assistant and an office manager a PA office manager or team assistant office manager and so many people when I speak to them about their office management roles whether they are in a hybrid position or purely office management say that people tend to just shoebox them into an assistant role oh
6:14 okay so you're an assistant then when they don't understand what it is that an office manager does office management to me is far less structured and more about seeking out what to do and a lot about having broader duties which are not often fed down to you in terms of what you actually need to do day to day in your roles whereas typically a traditional assistant role is fairly structured in terms of duties for example diary management travel bookings minute taking personal Arrangements like going to collect dry cleaning and looking after many houses in them various different places around the world and meeting coordination and much much more but they are very structured in that format and you are either looking after a person
7:00 um you know an individual or a team of individuals who will come to you for typically those various things whereas as I say the office management role is less structured and it is much more about being strategic being proactive and seeking out and understanding what it is that needs to be done because there's not really going to be many people above you or around you directing you other than the day-to-day things that you can see and feel because they're obvious like you know the coffee has run out or we need more stationary or you know there's no fridge there's no fridge there's no milk in the fridge and so on and so forth so there is to me a real difference and I think the two are often blended and wrapped up as administrative roles whereas I see them both separate to what
7:46 a typical administrative role is so how did we get there it would be really great for you to have a think about how you got to your role and if you are watching this to comment in YouTube and let us know um for me I was a branch secretary for an estate agent where I pretty much was the office manager as well although I didn't realize this at the time and I was doing lots of data input audio typing with the pedals you know this is many years ago 20 years ago now and um I was promoted to manage a load of Branch secretaries within that estate agents roll out a new it system and be the pa23 of the regional directors for the estate agent so around 20 branches
8:31 that I looked after the secretary's form I then went into London and for the first time saw a true office manager in a bigger business in ing real estate and I thought I really like the look of that job so I got involved in an office move so the project involvement in the the sort of pink color here um and then got a job at JP Morgan working in the office management team and sure enough within a couple of months of being there I was promoted to be an office manager so that was my route and it was I suppose intentionally sought that I would get into office management however it was a sort of falling into it kind of thing because my original career
9:17 trajectory was to be a PA for somebody like Victoria Beckham that's what I aspired to be a celebrity PA which I'm actually quite glad that I'm not now um and yes I did a legal secretarial diploma and you know got experience in London in law firms but yeah I saw the office management role and I fell in love with it and I never looked back after that so tell me what your typical route is we normally see it sits under one of these kind of areas and I did mention that there are some interesting facts around the growth of this role um so employment of the administrative Services profession and Facilities managers is projected to grow nine percent from 2020 to 2030 and this is
10:02 about the same sort of uh growth and average for a number of occupations but I find it really interesting because so many people at the start of the pandemic were saying oh it's the end of the office and office managers were getting in touch with me saying am I going to lose my job and so on and so forth but actually the opposite has happened and in fact there are about just under 30 000 openings for administrative services and Facilities managers projected year on year on average over the decade and here's another fact so in 2017 there were 178 000 office managers on LinkedIn in the UK and now there are over 345 000 and linkedin's a little bit dodgy
10:48 with some of these figures I have to point out because I think it changes depending on what they've written so we did a search on this for the title office manager but that does give you a generic idea a general idea on how this role has actually grown and hence why I say the significance of it is being recognized as being much more important much more part of the core of the businesses that they support so this slide here I like to share because so many people have different titles as I was saying a lot of us are called facilities managers when we're actually office managers traditionally in in my view as I say so things like director of First Impressions I've seen workplace manager head of workplace Center managers where you're going to
11:34 have a little bit more of a sales LED role in here because you are working for um like a flexible office or serviced office space where you will need to make sure that space is being occupied operations manager I've certainly had that one a few times in my career administrator coordinator Chief happiness officer I like that one um is that just on culture and wellbeing or is that on the whole office we've seen it on both and you've got things like head of people and culture and office also seen head of office head of people head of culture Etc does it really matter to me no being in these roles is so much about the job and what you get from it and I think in every job that you take in your career so what is in a name as Julia of the
12:21 Romeo kind said I don't think it matters I think what matters is you and your satisfaction within your job so what exactly does being an office manager mean for your business well we're going to have a look at that now as one person said it um when I was doing an interview for um or recruiting for them to replace their office manager they had said that their office manager to them is integral to the success of the business and they couldn't quite literally do it without them and I love the fact that they recognize that and they recognize that the office manager really does sit at the heart and as I say is integral to that business because as I mentioned on one of the first few slides there to me the office manager is
13:07 so much about creating that safe healthy working operating environment that motivates people to do their job without having the coffee that tastes good and is working and is seamless and without having the lights on and the air conditioning working and all the things that to me are you know sometimes not seen by people in our businesses as well as then the far more strategic pieces that we get involved in the budget planning the business continuity the culture the events the health and safety elements the day-to-day just getting out there and saying hi to people we we are part of that Beating Heart we are part of that moving ship and we're very much at the front of it for these businesses
13:53 so when we start thinking about and as I said already we touch every layer of the business it's important to give some consideration to who our stakeholders are stakeholders can be both organizations and people but ultimately we communicate with people and we want to ensure that we are aware of who our stakeholders are so here's a small sketch that demonstrates internal and external stakeholders that you may deal with most internals I'd imagine you deal with all of them perhaps not so much the board and shareholders but I know that a lot of office managers indirectly have contact with them through the MD CEO or their line manager and then externally well we do impact the community whether
14:39 they are directly coming into our business or not influencers may or may not impact our business and therefore our jobs and what we do competitors the same kind of thing because it might steer the organization in a different direction that then can impact our roles but certainly the last two in the external piece of suppliers and service providers and clients and customers we have an impact on those particularly if you have a reception area and you're either in a jewel role where you are the receptionist or you manage that receptionist and that Reception Area you will have an impact and they will be your stakeholders so take a moment to sketch out the titles and the the Departments of who your stakeholders are internally and externally and you can use something similar to this you know
15:25 Human Resources sales marketing Finance compliance legal the CEO your direct line manager the individual staff you know the first aiders and Fire Marshals where they've got specific responsibilities and so on and it's a really interesting thing to do to then give that some consideration as to how you deal and communicate with those stakeholders at different levels and whether you're getting that right and you're managing those stakeholder relationships well so now we're just going to have a quick look at the areas of responsibility because this is all about what an office manager is this was taken from a survey we did of 110 office managers back in June 2017 to show all the different areas of responsibility that office
16:10 managers typically have and now in 2021 we've got this new survey here and hopefully this slide will play if not I'll just play it quickly here for you but this shows just how much much that breadth of responsibility has grown health and safety print management cleaning culture marketing event management recruitment Waste Management corporate social responsibility DSE assessments business and operational excellence reception I.T support catering meeting room management there is so much to it that I think it's really important to highlight the difference from one side to another and how they have grown so what exactly does it mean for your
16:56 business well to me an awful lot you are quite literally charged within with ensuring the success of your business you are part of that moving ship and steering it in the direction that it needs to go you're doing this by creating an environment that works well in order to motivate engage and Infuse people to do their job and that's both a physical environment but also a non-physical one the feeling that people get when they're in your physical environment when they're working remotely from home and that Community feel that's created you know one of the most important things I think to do in our office management roles is to be engaging and is to be visible and whether that is virtually or in the office by doing things like
17:41 housekeeping checks and doing things like DSC so desk assessments to make sure that people are comfortable at their desk and they know how to set themselves up correctly because those things can make such a huge difference without all of that where would they be they wouldn't have a good place to work and you can very quickly tell when you go into offices the difference between a good office manager and the difference between one who is perhaps struggling and often they're struggling because there has been a lack of support and training for these roles and understanding of them for many years and we're trying to change the landscape on all of that to me everything we do in our office management roles is pretty much behind the scenes think about a time when
18:28 you've gone to the theater there is the lighting the set design the crew the runners the costume designers and the people that help with the quick changes the makeup artists and the hair artists the band under the pit the ushers that help us get in the ticket sales people and so on and so forth the choreographers directors and so on it literally is the same as an office manager role because all of those things that happen behind the scenes are what you are doing pretty much day to day in your role when people turn around and say to you what exactly do you do this is a really good analogy to use I'm kind of like the everything behind a theater production I deal with the lights I deal with the the furniture and how everything feels the food that you're sitting and eating and then you guys as
19:15 the staff are the people on stage running the show running the business I do everything to make that happen to enable it I really like that and I mentioned at the start that we're going to just talk briefly about the evolution of the role office managers are really no longer this secretary like I said my first title was Branch Secretary that was once before they're now an essential and fundamental profession that is really being recognized as making up that heart of the organization and it's fabulous to see So Gone on the days where we were simply known as the secretary office administrator and so on today's office manager is a professional who does so much more than make the
20:01 coffee make sure everybody's got a pen and paper and take dictation and notes we're pretty much on an equal standing with upper office management as seen by numerous organizations and a lot of research that we've carried out I've seen so many roles that I'm recruiting in a really high salary band but also sitting at you know near on board level having one-to-ones with the people running the show the CEOs the MDS and being heard and being recognized by them and it's so excellent and amazing to see so what is an office manager we say the rod the glue the go-to these are the things we often hear where you know with
20:47 a rod that holds everything up with the glue that holds everything together where that go-to person I'm the go-to person everybody always comes to me we are the super office hero and I really like this one because it's true we sweep in in the night when there's a link a leak and nobody knows about it and we get it fixed so that you know Amy's desk that was absolutely covered in water at two o'clock in the morning is clear and dry and the leak is fixed or at least you know held and preserved for the time being until we get the full fix done um and she will never know because come nine o'clock when she arrives at her desk it's all fine with a behind the scenes ninja think about that theater
21:32 um analogy again we are quite literally juggling hence this image and doing everything like a ninja behind the scenes most of the time and we are the person who brings so much value now and always and I really want you if you're in an office management role or you're heading into one to remember that you have value right now and you will always have value and it's just understanding exactly where that value is and projecting that and ensuring that you are getting that message across to your staff to your line managers in a very professional way in a succinct way so that people understand your role and understand you and the value that you bring because you always have that and that's it for today's session
22:19 um if you have any questions I'd love for you to reach out you can email me directly Hannah at the officemanagementgroup.com or visit our website theofficemanagementgroup.com where we've got all sorts of resources you can sign up to our newsletter on there to grab a free template we've got the officemanagementporter.com as well which is our membership platform and we'd love for you to be a part of that we've got a wonderful Community we do events here in London as well as part of that but we also share loads of blogs and advice and all sorts of information on there so feel free to get in touch and of course add any comments to this video that you'd like and ask any questions and I'll do my best to help answer those have a wonderful day [Music]
