Duties of the office manager

Often, especially in small organizations, an office manager is called an ordinary secretary. This post sounds much more solid, but the fact that the duties of the office manager are different from the secretaries (although they certainly have much in common), rarely anyone cares about this case.

What is the responsibility of this employee? First of all, it is the responsibility of the office manager to work with documents. The employee accepts the incoming correspondence, registers it, sends it to the addressee, sends it to the archive if necessary. He also accepts applications from other employees, passes them on to the CEO's signature, certifies them with a seal, and then gives back. The duties of the office manager include working with internal documentation: printout of orders and their registration, storage, sending to the archive and accounting, work with outgoing correspondence. If necessary, he should be able to work with any office equipment: fax machine, scanner, copier, and also type and print documents. Preparation of a room for presentations, keeping minutes of meetings, meeting and receiving guests and clients of the company are also part of the duties of an office manager.

Often, the employee has to deal with traditional secretarial duties: the distribution of invited partners or managers in hotels, reservation of rooms, air tickets and train tickets. Depending on the specifics of the firm, the office manager can also represent his company in business negotiations, as well as perform part of the duties of the HR manager: finding new employees, creating incentive and training programs, and applying for a job. Sometimes he deals with the implementation of information technology, the development of new programs.

The duties of an office manager involve knowing:

1. Legislative acts and regulations that regulate the legal, information, business activities of the company.
2. Fundamentals of management, marketing, entrepreneurship and business.
3. The fundamentals of sociology, psychology, ethics of business communication, work with staff and the public.
4. The procedure for drafting business proposals, reports, plans, contracts and agreements.
5. Fundamentals of management, the basics of ergonomics and labor protection.

In addition to these tasks, it is the responsibility of the office manager to carry out an inventory in the office and provide supplies (office supplies, paper and other supplies) that are required for the work of the employees. Also, he is obliged to keep records of these materials, ensure their issuance, determine the procedure for receiving, organize and track payment for supplies. The duties of the office manager include control over the state of office equipment, which includes: the operative call of the master for repair work, the timely replacement of consumables (for example, cartridges), in the event of impossibility of repair - the replacement of office equipment.

Depending on the rules accepted in the firm and its size, the office manager either accepts calls and faxes, redirects them to the right employee, sends faxes and calls up clients and partners, or controls the work of secretaries, including monitoring the culture of their speech. Also, the duties of the office manager include monitoring the sanitary condition of the office itself, organizing scheduled repairs, calling technical personnel to troubleshoot (for example, replacing lamps or sinking switches).

In general, this list may increase or decrease depending on the place of work. Therefore, it is necessary to ask at the interview stage what the office manager is doing (the duties of an employee in this company).