Often, especially in small organizations, an ordinary secretary is called an office manager. This position sounds much more solid, and the fact that the duties of the office manager are different from the secretarial ones (although they certainly have a lot in common) are rarely of concern to anyone in this case.
What is the responsibility of this employee? First of all, the duties of the office manager include working with documents. The employee accepts the received correspondence, registers it, transfers it to the addressee, and if necessary sends it to the archive. He also accepts applications from other employees, submits them to the CEO for signature, certifies them with a seal, and then returns them. The duties of the office manager include working with internal documentation: printing orders and their execution, storage, sending to the archive and accounting, work with outgoing correspondence. If necessary, he should be able to work with any office equipment: fax, scanner, copy machine, and also type and print documents. Preparation of premises for presentations, keeping minutes of meetings, meeting and receiving guests and clients of the company are also the duties of an office manager.
Often, an employee has to deal with traditional secretarial duties: distributing invited partners or managers in hotels, booking rooms, airline tickets and train tickets. Depending on the specifics of the company, the office manager himself can be a representative of his company in business negotiations, and also fulfill part of the duties of a personnel manager: searching for new employees, creating incentive and training programs, applying for a job. Sometimes he deals with the implementation of information technology, the development of new programs.
The duties of an office manager require knowledge of:
- Legislative acts and regulations that govern the legal, informational, entrepreneurial activities of the company.
- Fundamentals of management, marketing, entrepreneurship and business.
- The foundations of sociology, psychology, ethics of business communication, work with staff and the public.
- The procedure for compiling business proposals, reports, plans, contracts and agreements.
- Fundamentals of management, the basics of ergonomics and labor protection.
In addition to these tasks, the duties of the office manager include conducting an inventory in the office and providing the necessary supplies for work (stationery, paper and other accessories) that are required for the employees to work. He is also required to keep records of these materials, ensure their issuance, determine the order of receipt, organize and track payment for deliveries. The duties of the office manager include monitoring the state of office equipment, which includes: prompt call of a wizard to carry out repairs, timely replacement of consumables (for example, cartridges), and if repair is not possible, replacement of office equipment.
Depending on the rules adopted by the company and its size, the office manager either receives calls and faxes, forwards them to the right employee, sends faxes and calls customers and partners, or monitors the work of secretaries, including monitoring the culture of their speech. Also, the office manager's duties include monitoring the sanitary condition of the office itself, organizing scheduled repairs, and calling technical personnel to troubleshoot (for example, replacing lamps or closing 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 (job duties of an employee in this company).