Creative Office Manager

Most office managers wear a lot of hats. But when pressure hits, deadlines pile up, and people start looking for help, most of us naturally fall into one role more than the others. Take this quick quiz to discover your dominant office manager style.

The best office managers don't wait for problems to be reported. They go looking for them. Most people arrive at work, sit down, open their email, and begin reacting to whatever appears on their screen. Experienced office managers often do something different before they settle into the day's interruptions. They take a quick walk through the office. Not because they…

Trust falls: the timeless exercise that says “we value psychological safety” by asking you to fall backward and hope Brenda from Accounts Receivable is paying attention. There is a certain type of workplace activity that management believes will boost morale but instead causes large portions of the staff to quietly contemplate faking a dental emergency. Mandatory fun is one of…

Every organization has work that officially belongs to someone. And every organization has work that belongs to nobody. The second category is where office managers often live. Nobody assigned you to notice that the new scheduling system is confusing people. Nobody asked you to smooth over the disagreement between two departments before it became a major problem. Nobody put "keep…

If this bingo card looks familiar, that's because it isn't really a game. It's a snapshot of a typical day in the life of an office manager. Long before lunch, you've probably solved a printer problem, answered a "quick question" that turned into 20 minutes, tracked down information nobody else could find, and quietly prevented three small problems from becoming…