If you are like many small business owners, you might have a little time on your hands during this pandemic.
Most have employees who are working remotely, business is down (if not stopped) and life has been put on hold – hopefully not for long.
It is not a place any of us ever imagined we’d wake up to – yet here we are.
Use this unexpected free time to catch up on some of those tasks that seem to hit the back burner of your priority list – and stay there.
Any successful business has someone behind the scenes helping to keep things humming by connecting all the dots.
This person is typically an administrative assistant.
Often, these valuable employees have a vague understanding of what they are expected to do.
An accurate and updated job description is a valuable tool to help communicate job expectations and can be used when assessing how well an employee performed over the course of a performance period.
Administrative assistants are some of the most valuable of all employees because they are the doers, the ones who get things done. These valuable employees are instrumental in helping the organization achieve its objectives.
This, of course, is if they have a good understanding of what is expected of them and written employee goals to help them prioritize daily work tasks.
For example, an administrative assistant may be responsible for drafting business letters to vendors or clients.
The administrative assistant works for the manager of human resources.
The HR manager is charged with ensuring that all employee files are kept up-to-date and that those files maintain the required employee information.
There are 75 active employee files, and the administrative assistant needs to make sure each of those files has a completed I-9 form.
The administrative assistant now has a goal to ensure that all employees have the required I-9 forms in their personnel files.
This goal document might look like this:
The administrative assistant works for the manager of a large call center.
This call center has 50 employees who answer customer calls. Customer satisfaction scores have been declining, and the manager has learned that there has been a spike in caller wait times to 180 seconds (3 minutes).
The administrative assistant helps to manage and train call center employees.
The manager is asking the administrative assistant to help improve the satisfaction score by reducing call wait times and giving her a goal to improve call wait time by 90 seconds.
That goal document might look something like this:
Implementing a strategy requires a process to distribute responsibility throughout the organization.
Employee goals are important because they support the goals of individual departments, which should line up with the implementation of business strategy.
The beauty of flowing goal responsibility throughout the organization is that it gives every employee an opportunity to participate in the success of the organization.
Employee goals should be part of their job description, and staff should be assessed for completion of goals at the annual performance appraisal.
This responsibility helps employees understand how what they do (on a day-to-day basis) affects the ability of the organization to achieve corporate objectives.
Employees come to work with the intention of doing a good job.
Managers can help their staff succeed by giving them clear goals and helping them to understand what is expected so that they are better prepared to perform at desired levels.
Consistent communication with employees is the best way to keep employees engaged, so communicate often.
Administrative assistants, in particular, are vital to an organization’s success.
Take the time to write goals for them so they can help the organization achieve its business strategy.
Patricia Lotich, MBA is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organizational Excellence through the American Society for Quality. She has a driving passion to help small businesses, nonprofits and churches fulfill their mission by managing their resources of - people, time and money.
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