"Office Manager" and Other Admin Job Titles

Job titles for administrative positions are always interesting, because there is so much of "doing what is needed" in any administrative position. For that reason, people with the same job title at different companies may have only a small percentage of their job duties in common - even if their job descriptions are similar! Or they may have job duties normally associated with another job title. Often, one company's "Receptionist" is another company's "Office Manager", "HR Assistant", "Administrative Assistant", even "Executive Assistant"...or possibly a different title! Of course there are levels of experience and expertise implied, as well as tasks and responsibilities that are generally categorized into each position, but the overlap can still be quite striking.

Confession time: "Office Manager" isn't my official job title. But wait! Before you accuse me of fraud, allow me to point out that much of my job covers duties traditionally taken care of by the office manager. When people at my company introduce me, they often say, "Basically, she's the office manager." My company gave me the title "Operations Administrator" (a title I definitely like) because, my supervisor and the VP of HR explained, I don't technically manage any people, and because the duties encompassed in my roll include so many things that don't fit in the basic list of office manager duties.

Fair enough.

But for my blog, I wanted to use a blog title that would be easily recognizable as covering the types of things I address: running the office and the life of an admin. "Office Manager" seemed to capture it best. I'm not claiming it's my official job title, but it's my function more often than not!

(Thank goodness I got that off my chest!)

Here are the Office Manager and Senior Office Manager job descriptions from OfficeTeam's Salary Guide (which I highly recommend checking out - it drills down average salaries by job description and geographic location. How well are you being paid? Knowledge is power!):

 

Here's the take on office manager job titles on officemanagerblog.com.

I do a lot of the things listed, and many others besides!

How about you? What's your job title? Are you "Office Manager", officially or functionally?


That's it for now. Happy Monday, have a great week!

The Best Sticky Notes: Experiment

Let's get right down to business here and address a very important item in the office: sticky notes. They are so small, and yet so critical; often subtle nearly to the point of invisibility if they are doing their work, while being a source of exasperation if they don't do their work and begin to fall down before you were ready to be through with the note! And at other times they are the star of the show, depending on what use they're being put to. So it is clearly important to have quality sticky notes! Bad sticky notes that fall down too soon make me crazy. We should not have to reinforce sticky notes with tape y'all! (Sticky notes in weird colors is a whole 'nother issue, which I will sidestep for the sake of brevity.)

I don't know about you, but I am always getting office supplies sales reps contacting me who think they can save my company money. One of the ways they think they can save money for us is by selling us their off-brand sticky notes. By the time I was an office manager and responsible for making sticky note decisions for dozens of people, I'd already noticed that some of them just suck, so I was skeptical. 3M's Post-Its always stood out to me in terms of quality, but I decided to get scientific about it. If I'm going to make a far-reaching decision like this (ha!) I like to do it with evidence on my side! Some of the other brands are cheaper, so I wanted to be sure that, if I spent extra for top-of-the-line sticky notes it would be worth it!

So when one office supplies rep gave me a free sample of some non-3M sticky notes, I decided to test them to see just how long they would stick. I did the test with two notes initially: 3M Post-Its and the Business Source sticky notes the rep was trying to tell me were a "good alternative". I used the 3x3 inch size of each. I stuck one of each on my cube wall, which is fabricy, and one of each on a clean area of my white board. For my methodology, I was allowed to press the notes back down if the corners started to peel up, but otherwise I didn't interfere at all (no moving the notes, water tests, etc.).

The notes stuck on the fabric both fell down pretty quickly, so I didn't get any good data there. The good data came from the sticky notes on my whiteboard. After a few months I got another free sample and decided to add it to the mix. It's not totally scientific, but I figured it would still give me good information!

Sticky Notes Test

Results
Business Source - 11/15/11-12/8/11 - 23 Days
3M Post-It - 11/15/11-Present - 13 Months, 24 Days (and counting)
Staples - 8/20/12-Present - 4 Months, 18 Days (and counting)

As I suspected, 3M and their Post-Its are a clear winner. I was somewhat surprised, though, that the Staples branded notes are also doing well! The Business Source notes stuck for a paltry three weeks and two days, definitely unimpressive. I'll grant that there is a possibility I just got a bad batch (this was a small-scale study, obviously), but still. I call shenanigans on the claim that these would be a quality alternative to 3M's Post-Its!

How about you, have you done any sticky-note testing, scientifically or unscientifically? I'd love to hear about it!

I'll be sure to keep you posted (haha!) if one of these sticky notes falls down or if I get any other samples to add into the race.

Update: I posted an update on this ongoing experiment here!

Slightly Wise

I've been an office manager for a little over two years now, and I worked in admin for a handful of years before that. I find that as an office manager (and to an extent, an admin in general), I am called upon to be competent in an incredibly wide range of tasks. Some of them I totally know all about, and some of them are a surprise on the day I hear/figure out that I need to address them! While there is definitely some drudgery involved in any job, admin work is full of nuance and odd expertise and can be really fun and interesting. Some of the work is incredibly specific to the company and/or office, while some is transferable wisdom and expertise, not only to other jobs, but also to personal endeavors. I have learned a lot from my predecessors, research and straight up trial-and-error experience, so I thought it would be fun to share some of what I figure out on the internet. I am also well aware that there is plenty left in front of me to figure out! Hopefully my perspectives will help some other admins to navigate new interesting questions that come up in their jobs, or else amuse folks who are way more savvy than I am on some of these topics. I hope you'll weigh in in the comments section when you have something relevant to add!
-A Slightly Wise Office Manager