People ask me this all the time. The fact is that no two Office Mangers (who might also be called Business Managers, Operations Managers, Store Managers, Admin Assistants, or even, often, OWNER!) perform the exact same role. The job can consist of doing anything from accounting to payroll to marketing and really anything else the boss needs help with. In past jobs I’ve done everything from paralegal work to changing light bulbs to generating financial statements! Not to mention troubleshooting computers, dealing with shipping, doing collections . . . the list goes on and on.
There are a few key responsibilities we all seem to share:
- We all buy stuff for the business, be it office supplies, inventory, or computers
- Most of us serve some type of receptionist function (answering the phones, dealing with mail)
- We’re often the “go between” that brings the employees’ concerns to the bosses and explain the bosses’ decisions to the employees
- We touch on every, or at least most, aspects of the business in some way
- No one else in the company does the jobs we’re tasked with
Major responsibilities are usually some combination of:
- Accounting/bookkeeping
- Human resources
- Payroll
- Systems administration
- Shipping/receiving
- Infrastructure administration
- Vendor liaison
- Personal assistant to the boss(es)
Most great office managers have some very specific skills:
- The ability to multitask (I can’t even try to keep track of how many times a day I’m interrupted)
- Meticulous record-keeping (Have you ever tried to find something in a filing system that wasn’t well thought out or kept up? You might as well throw the paper out if you’re not going to do a good job filing it.)
- Great communications skills, and by that I mean the ability to get through to lots of different personality types and explain things like vacation accrual to anyone
- Curiosity to learn more and solve problems, because no matter how much you know, you’ll be asked to solve a problem you’ve never dealt with before (thank goodness for Google!)
It often surprises people to learn how much impact I have on important decisions a company makes. The employees may not realize it, but I’m involved in choices as small as what coffee to stock (although that isn’t small to me or the developers I work with!) to as big as what health insurance to offer. Office managers have a lot of spending power because we’re responsible for many of the choices the company makes, such as which payroll company to go with or whom to use for the water cooler. There’s a constant tug-of-war between the employees, who want the company to give them everything all the time, and the bosses, who’re nervously looking at the bottom line and worrying about this quarter’s sales vs. expenses. It’s often our job as office managers to find a happy medium where employees are satisfied enough AND the company can earn enough to keep paying those employees . . .
What about you? What are your responsibilities as an Office Manager? I’ve created a What are your job responsibilities section in the Office Manager Forum so that you can answer the question! Or feel free to leave a comment with your job descriptions.
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