How to be respected as an administrator by superiors

[forwardsandbackwardsandup]

I have worked in various finance and admin positions in my time and always seem to end up in the same position of being disrespected by colleagues.

Gripes include:

• making clear the procedure for doing something to have them ignored. Example - return expense claim form via email and send me a photo of receipts. To find an email with claim form attached and being told receipts are on my desk. Yes it takes me 2 secs to take a photo of them, but it also takes that person 2 secs and I have made it clear that's the process. I'm not always in the office every week and a bundle of loose receipts can easily go missing.
• again, making clear the procedure for something then being asked to do it within a shorter timescale, or with incomplete information provided.
• not being told about events that require admin input until the last second
• being asked to raise an invoice for something that has been in their inbox for weeks and has suddenly become urgent and expecting me to drop everything to get it out that day.
• me asking for information ahead of time in order to allow us to plan work and cash flow and being told that the other team doesn't have time to provide that to us.

I could go on. The general theme is lack of respect for our team. Except it isn't just this workplace, it has been everywhere. What am I doing wrong? Or what are we doing wrong cos it isn't just me?

I've made clear countless times the correct procedures for things. Then there's the annoying thing of it taking the same amount of time for me to fix it as it would for me to reply and ask them to do it properly. Is that just enabling them? Do I/we need to toughen up? Except in my current job some of the things asked of us include helping vulnerable people and I know no one our team would want to see anyone out of pocket due to digging our heels in to prove a point.

I'm an administrator and think the problem is it's a support role that's just not respected, and as others have said it's only really noticed when things don't get done or go wrong.

I was asked recently what my superpower was and I realised days later that it's making other people look good!

It's not just the expenses though, is it, it's all processes and a lack of respect.

I think maybe they all think they could do it and given the people I work with I know they definitely couldn't!

People are generally lazy and the only way to deal with this is to not do jobs for them because they can't be bothered or feel they are special and don't need to follow rules. I also agree that anything dumped on you should be sent right back stating that they need to follow procedure. Don't feel bad about doing this.

Im senior by the way and would never allow my team to be lazy and treat admin tasks like this. It builds overall team resentment. Everyone should be respected.

I'm in a similar role, it's five and take for me.
I push politely and firmly back if people are taking the piss but I understand that often they are also swamped and if I can help them out a little I will.
Im very much appreciated and have a good relationship with them.

*give and take

The one that annoyed me the most was asking at 12.51 on 21st Dec to get something sent special delivery (cut off 1pm) so the person would receive before Christmas. I was out of the office on lunch and didn't receive the email til after 1. The item needing sent was for work done that morning and had been known about by that team for at least a week, however if I had been told first thing to be on standby to run to the post office before 1 then I'd have done so. Infuriating!

There's no reason for you to find that infuriating though? That's not your problem. It's the problem of the idiot that didn't get their act together to send it in time. Can you not just shrug your shoulders when something like this happens?

From what you've posted, it sounds like you need to be willing to let people suffer the consequences of their own actions a bit more.

I also think a bit of humour helps rather than resentment. I had a senior manager once spill a load of sugar and he didn't know how to clean it up could I help him.
I made a massive song and dance about how pathetic that was that a successful man on 100k couldn't figure out how to use a dustpan and brush, suggested he got demoted as he's clearly not the brightest spark, and stood with my arms folded whilst he cleaned it up. He's never asked me to do anything like that for him again.

At my company we refer to what you're facing as travelled work, and it's actually part of our company values to avoid travelled work. I agree that what you're facing is disrespectful, as others have said I would push back, while you don't want to be seen as being unpartnering maybe you can explain why you're pushing back, not necessarily referring them to the policy but telling them about the impact of their action on you, ie you need to deprioritise other work (to deal with theirs) which has a downstream impact on xyz function, sometime providing context/bigger picture helps ☺️

We have an administrator like this in my department. I love her. She takes the absolute piss out of all the over-inflated male egos. It's wonderful seeing them deflate.

I'd put a sign up saying 'receipts left randomly on this desk will be shredded'.

I wouldn't keep explaining the reason for the procedure, I'd just not do any of my steps until the person had done theirs. I'd probably email them a copy of the procedure if they did it more than once, every time.

I wouldn't keep reminding them that I needed info ahead of time for cashflow, I'd just not get them the cashflow they needed and block whatever it was they wanted to do as it hadn't been forecast. I'd probably quote the 'magic money tree' at them.

I'd remind them if they needed me to do things, then they need to tell me in advance.

I'd definitely not race around doing invoices for them, if they needed them doing urgently, and I knew they were going to do that imminently, I'd book the afternoon doing something important and make sure they had to wait.

I'd probably by now though, have asked for a slot in their team meetings with a presentation on 'why I need these things', including forecasting, planning, audit and fraud processes and tell them together that I wasn't going to be putting my job on the line, to fill in for their lack of awarenesses. And I'd offer training sessions for all the above [and give them slots to choose] where they can be trained in the processes that they seem to keep misunderstanding.

-making clear the procedure for doing something to have them ignored. Example - return expense claim form via email and send me a photo of receipts. To find an email with claim form attached and being told receipts are on my desk. Yes it takes me 2 secs to take a photo of them, but it also takes that person 2 secs and I have made it clear that's the process. I'm not always in the office every week and a bundle of loose receipts can easily go missing. I'd return the claim and say you need a photo of recepits

-again, making clear the procedure for something then being asked to do it within a shorter timescale, or with incomplete information provided. Shorter timescale - I would do it but at the very last minute so they had to chase/worry. Incomplete info: just send back as incomplete.

-not being told about events that require admin input until the last second
being asked to raise an invoice for something that has been in their inbox for weeks and has suddenly become urgent and expecting me to drop everything to get it out that day. I sometimes used to say 'I am working on x for Mrs senior today, I am just going to check they're happy for me to do this instead, I'll get back to you'

me asking for information ahead of time in order to allow us to plan work and cash flow and being told that the other team doesn't have time to provide that to us Not much you can do about this, unfortunately.

Would you say you are nice/well-liked? I used to be really nice to people but also really clear with boundaries and they did learn over time. I also said no sometimes if requests were genuinely unreasonable. I went out of my way to help when they were behaving well.

If you're not backed up by senior managers you're buggered though.

The infuriating bit for me is that the item being sent - a voucher - could have made a difference to that person's Christmas. We work with vulnerable people and that supermarket voucher could have been her and her family's Christmas dinner. In an ordinary situation I'd have shrugged my shoulders and said that's fine it can be sent the next day. It was this precise one that got to me. I would hate for our organisation to get a bad name for something like that, and hate to think of that person's Christmas being ruined, all due to a lack of communication.

I'm all for drawing a hard line but when it's cases like that it becomes hard to.

@GCAcademic but you do make a good point about allowing people to suffer consequences for their own actions

That's amazing!

I bet your admin staff are slagging you off behind your back, you sound like a pita @DomesticShortHair

I'm now one of those giving work to admin staff and I just follow the process.

Use this point in your presentation to the team on the impact of their lack of planning.

I'm in a similar type of role and I agree completely. And my colleagues in Sweden and Germany have the same problems, so it's not just here in the UK.

I believe we should be given more seniority. When our company was smaller and I was a bigger fish I didn't have half these problems.

My team use the services of a shared admin team. We'd probably fall into the category of people you're complaining about. We typically get 400+ emails a day ranging from the CFO demanding to know about a particular £XXm accounting adjustment / HR wanting an org redesign tomorrow / the business wanting a meeting now to discuss the pricing of their product offering at one end of the scale to automated emails from our HR system / emails about work socials / emails about our latest purpose driven activities at the other. Obviously there is no way anyone can read & action 400 emails a day.

We really need our own admin assistants but they were removed several years ago on cost cutting grounds which is why we now use a pooled admin team. We're not lazy, we're just not able to get to all emails or take photos of expense receipts & email them over in a timely fashion.

What we need is an admin team to take work off our hands rather than add to it. We have some highly efficient admin staff who focus on service excellence, take the time to understand what their customers need & design processes around that. They are hugely helpful to us. On the other hand we have some admin staff that are process driven & can't use initiative / don't want to change the way things are done. The staff in the first category don't work longer hours than the staff in the second category.

If you're finding that a process isn't working, I'd suggest trying to find out why rather than automatically assuming the staff you're supporting are lazy or pushing the work back to them. There may be a solution which can work better for your team as well as your customers.

You make a good point about reviewing processes and systems having flex, both necessary and worth doing every so often to ensure things are working as well as possible and issues are picked up and sorted.

But your admins being removed due to cost-savings is just another reflection that this work isn’t properly valued by lots of organisations - your shared admin team can’t process-review their way out of a lack of investment in staff which ultimately causes these systems to fail. I get that other teams will be under enormous pressures and this can lead to admin having to flex but when you multiply that across the whole org and all departments who use admin support I think we end up carrying a disproportionate burden.

We had a guy at work once ask "can the typing girls get 1000 copies of this letter out today?" what the fuck?

Firstly, typing girls??

Secondly, we had already issued comms that any post larger than 80 envelopes had to be contracted out to a provider as we are tiny, usually one admin in at a time, and hold nowhere near enough envelopes and paper to do a mail out of that size. Plus the man management of sitting stuffing 1000 envelopes!

He got short shrift.

I often do the sorts of jobs you do and sometimes the same thing happens - I don't perceive it as a lack of respect. I even go to the point where I uncover unclaimed expenses for the team and believe me - telling someone they missed claiming a hotel bill for £130 and sending them the cash does nothing but increase the respect they show you. The team are busy, admin is a pain in the arse, it's the bit of their job they hate, it gets left to the last minute because they are doing other things that arguably are more important. I don't get hung up on this stuff. I see my job as being here to make their job as easy as possible. Maybe it's time for a change of job?

@Biscuitlover456 I entirely agree. The problem for my organization was that cost cutting targets were handed down so out the admin staff went... Effectively they got rid of the people earning £26-30k pa and instead "absorbed" the admin work they had done by passing it up to managers and senior managers earning more (& in some cases considerably more) whilst not reducing their other workload. Then they complained that staff weren't productive enough!

I have done the same. Someone new started and claimed expenses for an overnight trip that involved early train out, overnight, then late train home. He hadn't claimed for breakfast on the first day, nor dinner on the second. I checked that he hadn't missed them off his claim. He said no, he'd brought a sandwich on the way and was full from lunch so just had crisps on the way back, but thanks for looking out for him. That went both ways, I was appreciative that he submitted his claim correctly in the first place, and he was appreciative that I checked he wasn't missing anything. I have much more time for that colleague than the one who can't take a photo of his receipts.

Yes, he was new and likely had less on his plate than others at that moment in time but nevertheless took the time to do the right thing and be a nice person at the same time.

And a change of job. Yes, probably due. Anyone out there looking for someone with my transferable skills - uptight process driven but absolutely able to get shit done and surprisingly am willing to go above and beyond, if shown the right respect.