Figure 1. Organization: departments.

 

The Company Structure

Text 5. How the office works

The word 'office' means many things to many people. The dictionary will probably define it as a place where business is carried out or a place for storing records and information. In a legal context, the Offices, Shops and Railway Premises Act of 1963 includes the activities of administration, handling money, filing, typing and carrying out clerical work as the main functions of an office. It does not matter whether an office is elegantly furnished, with lots of potted plants and air conditioning or whether it is rather old fashioned without so much as an electric typewriter; what is important is the tasks that are carried out and also the atmosphere of the office—the helpful, friendly relationships formed between the people who work there.

The office: 'brain or nerve centre'

In essence, an office is an information collecting, holding and dispersing system. Clearly what is received, stored and sent out will depend upon the nature of the company or public service organization, but most offices share this function of handling information. As we have already learned, managers in organizations have a constant need to be kept informed of what is going on, so they require schedules, returns and forms to be dispatched to them by branch managers or sales representatives aimed at 'keeping them in the picture'. Similarly, the organization will have contact with many individuals and outside firms. Orders, cheques in payment, enquiries, and a host of other communications will arrive in an office from outside organizations every day. These can be letters, telephone or telex messages or information brought by visiting salesmen or customers. All this information has to be processed, frequently recorded and given to an appropriate member of staff. Thus an office may be considered as a nerve centre which controls and directs the activities of the organization.

Just as the organization as a whole may be regarded as a pyramid in its structure, so may the office which heads a particular department within the organization.

How the work of an office is divided and allocated depends on its particular responsibilities, whether for accounts, personnel, marketing and so on. However, a number of tasks and duties are common to virtually every office and include: sorting and attending to the incoming post answering and acting upon incoming telephone messages; composing, typing and dispatching letters, memoranda, reports, etc; maintaining an efficient filing system for reference and record purposes; relaying information up, down and across the organization; dealing with customer enquiries completing government returns and schedules.

Electronics in the office

As a result of the 'information explosion' and the electronics

revolution, many offices now use computers, word processors and sophisticated accounting machines to help them to maintain the flow of communications and to hold records efficiently. Information is not only stored on paper, but is also held on micro-film and micro-fiche or in the memory banks of computers. Indeed, developments in tele­communications now mean computers can 'talk' to each other across continents. Post Office facilities like Confravision enable executives many miles apart to hold meetings via television 'hook-ups'. How extensively offices adopt the new electronics will depend on many factors: cost, efficiency and, by no means least, the need for job satisfaction among office workers. But there is no doubt that the clerks of the nineteenth century would be amazed at how the office has changed since the days of the quill pen.

The office manager

The person at the head of an office organization, the office

manager has a very important job. There are many demands on his time and always he has to make sure that things run smoothly. As well as being responsible for up to 50 or 60 office staff he might have 450 branch offices throughout the country. These he would have to keep stocked with sales documents such as receipt books, invoice pads, headed note-paper, and so on. Or, he may have to ensure that a company's 6000 employees all receive the correct pay at the correct time. Whatever he is doing, the office manager must make sure that the company's objectives are being met, but that the costs are kept to a minimum. Also, the office manager has to make sure that the work of the office has been properly delegated and is being efficiently supervised. Mistakes can be very costly and he very definitely takes the blame if things go wrong. In allocating and supervising the work of the office, he will need to keep a watchful eye on the personal relationships of his staff and be ever-ready to step in if there is a conflict or if morale becomes low. Clearly he cannot do all this himself, so he will rely on his senior supervisors to look after delegated responsibilities such as customer accounts, expenses or order processing.

The office supervisor

The office supervisor often acts as a staging-post or junction-box, since he will be given a job to do by the office manager. This will mean that the supervisor's staff will need to be briefed and instructions may have to be given carefully and in detail to ensure that what the manager said in broad terms is carried out in precise detail. Thus the supervisor will be in close contact with the filing clerk or audio-typist. Therefore, any problems at the bottom of the office pyramid will need to be spotted by the supervisor and reported to the manager. Equally, it will be up to the supervisor to tell the manager of any complaints or criticisms the junior staff may have. As you can see, it is important that an office supervisor is a good communicator who can establish pleasant yet productive relationships with staff.

Though problems will occur in an office on any day, much of its work is routine and recurs at regular intervals. For example, in an accounts office, customer account statements need to be compiled and dispatched at the end of each month or trading period. In a transport office, company vehicles need to be licensed and taxed annually. Thus in every office, there are many activities which have been organized in a routine system, where a cycle of events is repeated daily, weekly or monthly. Though such routine work may lack glamour and excitement, it is extremely important and the supervisor well knows the need to keep such routine systems working smoothly!

The office junior

Because of the way offices tend to be structured, where responsibilities are divided into sections and further subdivided as tasks and delegated to individual members of staff, the work of the office junior is likely to be very detailed, and only a small part of a much larger undertaking. A clerk, for example, may be solely concerned with maintaining the supply of a large office's stationery, or a typist may type only letters dealing with customer complaints.

Many junior members of staff will be in their teens or early twenties, and will therefore be learning about the work in their part of the office. But it is very important that office juniors take a lively and active interest in what is going on around them, so that they prove capable of assuming more responsibility when opportunities for promotion arise. In the same way, the go-ahead office junior will seek to acquire additional expertise on in-house training courses or day-release courses at local colleges. The following list includes some of the main activities which the office junior may perform: opening and sorting the morning's post, sorting incoming invoices and bills, producing quotations for customer enquiries, typing correspondence and documents, maintaining the filing system, making up monies to be banked, making up wage packets, running a switchboard, dealing with visitors, ordering stationery and office consumables, duplicating office forms and documents.

As you can see, though many of these tasks are routine, there is not one of them which is not important for the efficient running of the office. Thus the office junior is very much at the 'sharp end' of the office's work, and employs daily the communication skills of speaking, reading, writing and listening. The work requires attention to detail and accuracy and an ability to get along cheerfully with fellow workers. Though the office junior may be at the base of the office pyramid, there is no doubt that, unless such work is properly carried out, the office would grind to a halt. And so the idea of the office junior holding up the rest of the office pyramid on his shoulders is not just a fanciful one!