3 easy ways to boost your potential as an administrative professional

Automate, communicate, and prioritise the projects that excite you

In a role as fast-paced and changeable as administration, it can be easy to fill your entire day - week - year! - with repetitive tasks, making it a struggle to find time for more engaging, complex projects. So what to do if you want to escape the pile-up and fulfil your true potential as an administrative professional? Here are the recommended first steps: Cut the admin, create goals and priorities, and make constant communication your new normal.

1. Implement tech to automate repetitive tasks

While many people grumble about ‘admin tasks’ when they think about finicky, repetitive jobs, these really pile up for administrators. Organising travel, managing executive diaries, emailing, invoicing, welcoming visitors, placing orders for the office, booking meeting rooms… These tasks are essential for businesses to run smoothly, but they also take up a big chunk of each workday and prevent administrators from diving into more valuable projects.

One solution is to make these tasks as quick and efficient as possible with smart software tools. For example, Greetly automates guest registration and welcoming, Skeeda allows staff to book their own meeting rooms, and Xero simplifies invoicing. For organisation and project management, some excellent options include Monday, Trello, and Jira.

Parkable’s contribution is to make car park management simple. By automatically resolving parking issues, allowing multiple locations to be managed on one platform, providing real-time occupancy tracking, and generating usage reports, administrators can drastically reduce time spent thinking about the car park (because, really, who but us wants to do that?).

“Administration on Parkable is extremely straight-forward and very useful.”

- Denise McBirney, Office Administrator for Reckitt Benckiser

However, tech isn’t the only way to greatly improve efficiency - you can also create your own processes to cut corners, such as writing email templates to respond to common queries that you simply copy-paste. For more great, time-saving tools for organisation, travel, and project management, click here.

2. Set yourself long-term goals and priorities

Because administrative roles are so broad, dynamic, and variable, it can be difficult to keep your workload and priorities under control - and that’s an easy street to burnout. While a daily ‘to do’ list can keep you calm throughout the day, it’s just as important to have a long view of your goals and objectives, whether they may be business-related, skills-based, or personal. As well as retaining your sanity, having set goals will help you (and your manager) to measure your success, and stretch you to fulfil your abilities.

But how best to do this is an ever-changing role? For EAs and personal assistants, you can look to your executive to determine goals that will align with their objectives for the year. If you’re in a broader office administration role, you can base your priorities and goals on business aims, making sure that you are primarily adding value to the most crucial areas. Examples include upgrading business processes and procedures to increase efficiency and improve the user experience, researching best practice for essential administrative tasks, involving yourself in a business task that motivates and excites you, or taking the time for an area of personal development.

Of course, when setting goals, always make sure that they are SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. (If you’re interested, check out this comprehensive guide to creating SMART goals).

3. Make communication your biggest asset

Often, administrators’ workloads come from a variety of sources across the business. To stay on top of all of the tasks and projects you’re involved with or project managing, strong communication is absolutely essential. Whether you work with one executive exclusively, a large team, or the whole business, it’s important to always be on the same page about deadlines, priorities, objectives, and any changes. Plus, as an administrator, ensuring that communication is flowing smoothly throughout the team is often put on your plate.

Depending on the situation, great communication may involve setting up a daily huddle or standup with key members, having a weekly catchup to see how different teams are progressing on a specific project, or messaging updates during the day via a channel like Slack. Once you’ve completed a task - shipped a project, implemented a new software, or started a new process - you’ll also want to gather feedback from key team members or affected staff. That will ensure that you’ve really met the mark and that your communication doesn’t drop off at a crucial stage. Try out SurveyMonkey or Officevibe and access the information you want.

Not only will great communication help you to fulfil your potential as a project manager, but it will help everyone in your organisation to fulfil their potential by delivering on projects, too.

Car park administration draining your time?

If you could do with fewer parking issues in your life, contact our friendly team to discuss how Parkable can create more efficient, seamless car park processes for your organisation.