To ask who is going to stand up for all the administration and clerical staff

[DoeEyedNear]

We have people fighting for doctors, nurses, teachers, firemen, soldiers, police officers... But no one ever seems to stand up for the hardest hit group of public sector workers. The office staff.

Is it because it's not seen as essential?

My dh works with a lot of brilliant admin staff at work, some of them do about three different job roles to keep things moving. He works in nhs but not in admin.

What happens when the department needs to make savings? These hard working low paid staff are put 'at risk' and some loose their jobs. Meanwhile (and I may get flamed for this) admin middle management on bands 8 and higher sit never seemed to get scrutinised on their job performance. In dh's office their are three middle management level admin staff, all completely useless, they spend the day emailing each other stupid pictures, internet shopping, attending time wasting meetings they set up, and then they leave after a four hour day... The office runs better when they are not in.

I'm an administrator in a school along with 2 others - we each have our own very specific responsibilities.

I'd love to see the teaching staff/key carers take over our roles - the vast majority can barely work the photocopier or change an ink cartridge!

I'm sure a lot of people would make admin redundant if they had the chance. Most of them don't realise that nowhere would run without administration.

I work for social services finance and it takes a long time to learn the role, we financially assess nursing home residents and deal with complex funding enquiries. Our team has been cut to its bare bones now.

I think admin roles in the old fashioned sense of typing letters and making the tea is probably dying out but large public sector organisations have a lot of specialist admin who deal with anything from appointment bookings, public enquiries, keeping databases, keeping on top of the latest government legislation and making sure it is implemented in how their organisation runs. A lot of these jobs need specialist knowledge and would not be as easily replaceable as some people seem to think.

I'm a teacher and the place would fall apart without our office team. Most of the teachers and parents appreciate them, but unfortunately they are taken for granted by some.

I think it's partly because people think that admin staff are more able to vote with their feet. I.e. if a fireman is unhappy with his pay and conditions there is alternative other fire service he can go and work for. But for admin staff, there is the perception that there are office jobs all over the place.

That's not really the reality in a lot of cases, but I think that can be the perception.

The trouble is, partially, the perception of the 'admin' role - and in some cases, especially in the Public sector, the nature of the people filling it.

It's too narrow a title to cover what happens under it. 'Admin' can be someone sitting filing all day every day through to an exec PA through to a Group Office Manager, overseeing multiple departments and hundreds of people.

But everyone hears 'admin' and thinks the first - little women in an office, typing a few letters and faxing and filing - and so there's no external value ascribed to it.

That's made worse, because it's also an internal attitude in some places. I was, for six years, admin for the NHS - and I lost the will to live on a daily basis with the 'old guard' team who worked in the place, who not only couldn't adapt to new systems, but refused even to try.

They'd started as part-time, pin money housewives and they wanted to carry on in that role, despite it being wildly inappropriate. The ridiculousness that went on accordingly would take your breath away.

The two together made for a lethal combination, at least where I was. There was no importance placed externally, and with no drive to upskill internally, admin, particularly Receptionist, remained an entry level job, with no specific training required, when it should have been anything but twenty years ago!

It's changing, I think, and I'm actually thrilled to see all the stuff flying around from the 'skilled' professionals in support of their admin teams, but it's not there yet.

Case in point, still - medical letters. I got one the other day from the Reception health check thingy. Two pages of pre-typed form with drop down boxes selected.

The problem with it? Only two lines were on the second page. No-one had thought to reformat to drop it to a single page (and it only needed a delete key in some unneeded return gaps) or even to print double sided.

Chances are, having worked in the type of place the letter will have come from, that the person sending it isn't skilled or confident enough to make the changes on the computer, but the result is a letter that's wasting ten's of thousands of sheets of paper every year - just from that one department. It's probably been in use like that for at least five years - and until someone comes along who has the skills, will continue to be for the foreseeable.

Until stuff like that stops happening, 'admin' is an easy target, unfortunately.

ginny - a lot of those letters are produced by applications and need reformatting centrally. Nobody tells IT or the supplier. Or they do but the supplier doesn't prioritise the work because they aren't paying the paper bill.

and I lost the will to live on a daily basis with the 'old guard' team who worked in the place, who not only couldn't adapt to new systems, but refused even to try. They'd started as part-time, pin money housewives and they wanted to carry on in that role, despite it being wildly inappropriate. The ridiculousness that went on accordingly would take your breath away.

This is what I'm talking about Ginny, There are a group of 'veteran' ladies in the admin office where DH works, everyone has really pulled together to get this new software up and running, including training front line staff to use it properly, its been a whole trust effort. But this one group has made it almost impossible at every time by being so pigheaded towards the software update and changes- they have not made an effort at all and some members of the office staff have complained to the director about them. Two of the four are infuriating 'middle management' on band 8 salaries.

It was politically deemed a better move to cut admin, rather than 'front line staff.' It's a shame that nobody shouted loud enough that the consequences of many of those cuts meant that now the front line staff have to do the back room admin, taking them away from the work they came into the role to do.

Short term saving vs long term efficiency.

Like others have said its because admin is lumped in with the Middle management tiers (who incidentally seem to review whose essential below them but somehow the spotlight is rarely turned in them) and a significant minority proving the worst stereotypes out there. I've an nhs background and regularly hear the phrases 'that's not my job' (it is) and 'they can't make me do that' (they can). Picking their battles may be wiser. You can't spend a significant portion of your day essentially socialising then expect people to value what you do.....

Anyway, it will get worse. Especially in the nhs. The living wage essentially wipes out all band 2 workers and a good part of band 3. This won't be a case of of arsehole managers, it will simply be unaffordable. 2020 or whenever it is may seem a while off but I haven't seen any major changes in the lower bandings since I joined the nhs over 6 years ago so don't expect it'll have been factored in for the next six before they announced it.

"But the people running this country have never done a days administration in their lives so are oblivious to it." Actually they probably have. Of all jobs most of us however senior all do a lot of admin these days.

my observation, at least in my industry is that admin roles require people with significant brain power, communication and organizational skills, not to mention technical aptitude. However, I think the culture hasn't keep up with the shift. Old style admins who merely formatted Word documents and Excel spreadsheets don't work anymore - they need people to actually create the formulas in the worksheets. The problem is that people still treat admins like the admins of yore - and then wonder why they are stressed/frustrated/quit. You actually need to be pretty smart to be a good administrator. I wish people would respect the job more.

People really undervalue admin - managers think we are all a useless waste of money, clinical staff think we are an overpaid, useless waste of money. So many nurses say to me 'oh it's alright for you, you're paid loads' umm no, I'm a band 2! And whilst people think that clinical staff can pick up the admin side of things, the reality is that a lot of them are barely computer literate.

Totally agree. Funny that most MPs seem to be happy to keep their secretaries - quite right too. I still bear the scars of the last time we were without a band 4. I ended up bringing paper in from home to fill the printer, and our band 8 who is a national leader in her clinical field had to stuff envelopes. And before anyone asks why we don't just email everything, it doesn't work with our client group.

Admin. is one thing but it's no use pretending that as many clerical staff will ever be needed as before the Chip. The ability to use a keyboard is not on its own enough to earn you a living nowadays and it never will be again.

Just like scores of thousands of jobs in photo-processing labs were destroyed when people like us bought digital cameras and stopped using film. That's life.

As for I think admin is seen as 'women's work' - the manual typewriter, for which women's smaller hands were (probably correctly) seen as more suitable than men's, destroyed the jobs of the old (male) Dickensian copying clerks. You can't freeze the world in aspic.

I've worked in a lot of public sector admin roles. I do a lot of project work so I've moved around a lot. There are some sectors (particularly Social Services) where there are a few overstretched administrators who are taking on an awful lot of work doing a heroic job. Ditto a lot of NHS typists who are snowed under with letters and dealing with a huge backlog who just basically work flat out.

But I also noticed within some parts of the NHS, that there was very much a culture of 'making work for yourself'. This was particularly noticeable as a contractor because it would often really upset long standing staff if you found a quicker or more efficient way of doing things. It was in their interests not to make things efficient as they didn't want to be out of a job. So for instance instead if a manager wanted 8 stapled collated documents for a meeting, instead of printing out 8 stapled collated copies from the copier they would print out 1 copy and photocopy it in the SAME copier and staple it manually even though the copier could have done it.

Same with making hard copies to file of things which really didn't need filing non-electronically, like minutes etc, things without signatures. Creating a lot of totally unnecessary bureaucracy which serves no purpose other than keeping them in a job like ridiculously circuitous processes for getting a box of staples involving several spreadsheets, documents signed by multiple staff members and more than one purchase order number/reference and a few separate database.

There also often seemed to be a culture of managers viewing admin people as a prestige item rather than a human resource. Often they would expect to have someone available to do their admin tasks immediately even if they were few and far between and I often came across secretaries who spent most of the day drinking tea and chatting or playing Candy Crush and surfing Facebook because they only did anything when their manager dropped off a letter and or wanted them to minute a meeting even if that only happened a few times a day and sometimes not at all.

I've also seen departments which have got hopelessly behind with patient concerned work because most of their staff members spend their time skiving then when they're up against it crying that they're understaffed and overworked when I know they spent most of the last six weeks eating cake and discussing their grandchildren, gardens and latest operations.

I've seen a LOT and I really do think public sector admin is an area where a lot could be done to improve efficiency and working practices. Not least because some departments are unfairly picking up the slack for others.

And rather than nobody standing up for them, I've often found that these situations are perpetuated because Unions are very effective at blocking any improvements which might led to a few less jobs for people who aren't doing much.

I totally agree about the 'old guard' admin - they drive me nuts. They are VERY protective about their jobs and won't teach any new staff members any part of their role in case someone else shows them up, they keep keys to important filing cabinets/drawers on their person so that when they are off sick or on holiday nobody can access stored electronic equipment/important hard copy records, they never seemed to have actually attended a secretarial course so their spelling, grammar and letter layout is crap, they take all day to do very little and they treat all the younger admin staff as upstarts.

Of course, part of the bonus of them all working in public sector/NHS (on old, better working contracts) means they have more holiday, generous pensions and better pay (as they have been there so long they are top of the grade) than other newer admin staff. None of them are budging until they have to and some are still there well after their retirement age because they can't get rid of them.

Thankfully things are changing but only because time is marching on and not because younger, better skilled admin are now part of the organisation as the payoffs to get rid of these dinosaurs would make most management sick!

Years ago an ambitious, bright secretary would never have gone near public sector jobs but things have changed and I am pleased to say that I have come across brilliant administrators who really make a difference and take on far more than secretaries ever did. I notice now that these roles seem to have the word 'Officer' attached rather than 'Administrator' so gradually the 'pin money' types will be gone within the next few years.

Having worked in the NHS and seen how undervalued adminstrators are - as well as the Band 5-7 managers who tend to do the bulk of the 8a and above's work - not to mention the clinicians who just seem to view them as brainless bimbos in it for the pin money. The real problem seems to be how the media, and thus certain elements of the general public, view the role. If don't properly then administration shouldn't really be noticed because it all works seamlessly. It is only when the admin isn't there that people will appreciate how much they actually contribute to the running of an organisation.

Do it!
Who do you think creates the campaigns, creates the photos and letters that go viral? Who makes the public aware of what's going on and tries to get them on our side? The staff! Who created #ImInWorkJeremy, started a petition to vote no confidence, all the things that have hit the headlines and garnered the attention and empathy of thousands.

No-one is going to do it for you, start a movement and it will snowball. You just need to stick together and fight.

This ^
If you want to be taken seriously then you need to group together and stand up for yourselves. Why should anyone else do it?
Its your own responsibility just like the doctors are standing up for themselves and the teachers are standing up for themselves.
I say this as someone who appreciates all that you do but you can't be passive and expect someone else to fight your corner.

Lazy In my experience things are a lot different than what you have portrayed.

All our meetings are now paperless, obviously people may choose to print out agendas etc but this is certainly not encouraged. The use of Smart boards, tele/video conferencing is the norm now.

We also use shared drives to store electronic files so that if someone gets hit by a bus/ goes on holiday/leaves the organisation the information is readily available. The same goes for email, I'm currently on leave but my mgr and cover have access to respond on my behalf as I do for them. I also have global desk top so if something kicks off while Im not in the office I can respond.

The secretary title is somewhat outdated now as it would be unusual for copy/ audio typing to be done as most have the necessary keyboards skills to type it up themselves.

If you have knowledge of current NHS procurement systems you would know that we use a national e-system ie PECOS. No need for paper at all.

Administration roles are evolving moving away from the traditional secretarial into Project work/ HR/Training/ Contract Mgmt/Procurement/Logistics/ Crisis Mgmt/Transport/IT/Facilities Mgmt to name but a few...

I find it hard to believe that there can be that many "dinosaurs" around as for many years there has been a block on recruiting into A&C roles and the posts lost on natural wastage have not been replaced. Thus, leading for those left to pick even more work.

I speak as a higher level A&C and quite frankly the assumption that my colleagues are sitting around chatting over tea and biscuits FUCK ME RIGHT OFF

KUA

Having worked on contracts recently for two large and prestigious leading NHS Hospital Trusts, plus a smaller hospital trust and two trusts outside the hospital system that is not my experience at all.

All of them still had printed agendas, what you describe certainly isn't the norm in the trusts I've worked at, which are very highly regarded and not backwards in terms of technology.

I'm not even sure if you really do work in the NHS if you think copy/audio typing is unusual! Do you really think that all the consultants and doctors sit doing two finger typing out to or three letters per patient plus notes for the 30 odd patients they see a day! I don't think so. They really don't get paid massive salaries to spend hours sitting typing at 15wpm. Audio typing in particular is ubiquitous in hospitals.

I'm aware that there are admin roles that take in other aspects, like project work. I did one. I'm not sure about a block on recruiting A&C staff either. I must have imagined all the interviews I sat in on and all the externals I saw get jobs.

And just regarding PECOS. In my experience PECOS doesn't work in the way it's supposed to because an awful lot of administrators run parallel systems just for the sake of it. They do the ordering to one cost code but then when it comes in they divvy it up to go to other cost codes so they run their own internal purchasing system with another set of codes and then they have to deal with finance doing internal transfers to reallocate the money for the transfer, it's creating another layer of red tape for no good reason, just for the sake of it.

I'm well aware that not all admin workers in the NHS sit around drinking tea. I've worked with some who worked very hard. But there are departments were laziness is ingrained, it's not just older people either. I've worked with younger people who are the same, often because they're the second or third generation of a family to work for the NHS and they've received the message that you have a job for life and it will be almost impossible to get rid of you unless you fuck up to the point of causing someone's death. And even then you might get away with it if you're lucky.

Honestly, I remember afternoons when the managers were out of people playing golf with tennis balls and rolled up posters, or racing chairs with sweeping brushes, cake sales which stopped the office for an hour twice a week, essentially coffee mornings, even a bloody Avon party once.

Yes, some admin departments work very hard, but some do things which in the private sector would mean their departments wouldn't exist much longer if they'd ever been allowed to exist in the first place!

Well, what can I say. I don't recognise/have witnessed of the behaviour you have stated. Possibly as I am in Scotland and our health service is devolved.

Glad you mentioned Finance, I should have mentioned them earlier, I also should have mentioned Accounts.

PECOS that sounds like a basic training issue.

Copy typing is on the way out including on the clinical side.

You may not be aware that the are various trials using speech software to dictate notes etc

This is why I am the first to say that administration roles are evolving .

I'm an HCP - and we definitely stand up for the admin team!! They are absolutely essential, and the first thing I tell any new starter is to be nice to the admin team / ward Clark.. Because they know everyone, can tell you where to find anything.. And it has been a team we have absolutely fought to keep as essential when there is any mention of cuts.