Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Admins Face More Stress Than Ever: Are You Showing Your Appreciation?

Now that Administrative Professionals Week has come to a close, I wanted to reflect on my admin-related experiences over the years.

Fresh out of college, I was the admin. I answered the front desk phone at my PR agency, processed my boss’ expenses, and set up meeting logistics in addition to my account management responsibilities. I will never forget the day I hopped in a cab and drove from New York City to Raleigh, NC because a client needed a contract with a wet signature and the mail wouldn’t get it there on time.

As my career grew, I was fortunate to share an admin with my team. This woman worked long hours behind the scenes to ensure that we could all do our jobs effectively. I was always low on the totem pole in the admin’s eyes, so I went out of my way to express gratitude and engender her goodwill. She once told me she wished I was the boss, and the comment made my day.

Another admin with whom I worked had the most prestigious role in the whole organization besides her boss, the CEO. She was frustrated with her life of alternating mindless and firefighting tasks, so I said: “You do realize you have the ear of the CEO, and that makes your opinion more valuable than anyone else’s.” She hadn’t thought about it that way, but it was true.

Admins Continue to Juggle Mightily

 For the last four years, Staples has issued an online survey in honor of Administrative Professionals’ Day in April. This year’s results, which featured responses from both admins and non-admins, highlight the growing workload of administrative assistants across the United States and Canada. More than half of admins support more staff than the previous year, and many admins are taking on responsibilities above and beyond their job descriptions, including budget and payroll (46.7 percent), human resources (43.9 percent), and social media (23.1 percent).

Admins were rated as better creative problem solvers (57.4 vs. 42.5 percent) and more tech-savvy (43.4 vs. 29 percent) than their bosses. Respondents also said admins have a better sense of humor (58.7 vs. 46.1 percent), are better team players (61.5 vs. 44.4 percent), and are more likely to be described as a friend (44.3 vs. 29.4 percent) than the boss. And in an era when most change jobs every few years, admins are loyal. Close to half (45.6 percent) have been with their current company for six or more years.

Support for Admins Takes Over Social Media

I joined with Staples to co-host #CelebrateAdmins, a Twitter chat to voice support for admins who give so much and yet don’t always receive the appreciation they deserve. It was touching to see admins band together to empower one another, and also managers posting photos and raising virtual toasts to their right-hand men and women. Here are some highlights from the discussion:

Brian Moran ‏@brianmoran 

A successful small business is only as good as their support staff. It's that simple. #CelebrateAdmins

Kelly Olsakovsky ‏@KellyOlsakovsky 

Got a "thank you" from two of my bosses - who needs flowers when they take the time to express gratitude? #CelebrateAdmins

Alexandra Levit ‏@alevit 

Humor is essential for A) keeping the mood light, and B) diffusing tension. Admins are the masters at both! #CelebrateAdmins

Vanessa King ‏@manhattancanuck 

Occasionally you just have to shrug your shoulders... there are only so many mountains you can move in one day. #CelebrateAdmins

JC ‏@whirlsy 

Virtual assistants work for smaller tasks like reminders for meetings, quick access to phone #'s & emails. #CelebrateAdmins

Carrie Maslen ‏@carriemaslen 

Some tasks could be done virtually, but others need a personal touch, human intuition and decision making. #CelebrateAdmins

Rebecca H. G. ‏@rhoneygee 

It's hard to find a job where you can stay 35 years anymore. #CelebrateAdmins

Laura ‏@charmedpaper 

You (admins) have so many things going on at once that it is imperative to be organized. .#CelebrateAdmins

Mr techy ‏@PoppaTechy  

(You must show) empathy for employees, compassion, understanding and professionalism at all times! #CelebrateAdmins

D&k ‏@dad1111 

My boss wasn't a team player but I made him look like one ;) #CelebrateAdmins

 

 

 

 

 

Glassdoor Ranks 5 Star Companies

If you’ve looked for a job in the last five years, chances are you are familiar with Glassdoor. Known as the go-to website for employee reviews of their companies, Glassdoor only has 37 companies (out of nearly 150,000) with a perfect five-star rating. In order to determine what these highly-praised companies were doing right, consulting firm Software Advice analyzed their qualities and reported the following.

Little and Latest: Startups Rein Supreme

Nearly three-quarters of the top-rated companies were founded in the past 10 years, while 90 percent employed 149 employees or less. This makes sense if you understand that half of all visitors to the Glassdoor site are 18-34 year-old millennials, and millennials are known for preferring work at smaller companies. The top-rated companies also tend to be stereotypical startups. Forty-two percent are in the business services sector, while 39 percent are in the information technology sector. Sixteen out of 37 five-star companies are located in California – the global hub of tech-startup action.

If your company is old and large, there’s not much you can do about that. However, you can promote a startup-like culture – through the fostering of innovation, flexible schedules, and shifting challenges and responsibilities – in order to capture some of the Glassdoor magic.

Likeable: Collegial Support Makes the Employment Experience

Over-the-top perks are not what excite Glassdoor reviewers. Rather, it’s the camaraderie and support of co-workers that keep them enthused to show up at work. Thirty-eight percent of reviewers commented on the importance of their team, and managers that promote group cohesiveness and bonding were mentioned as well.

If you’re relying exclusively on benefits to retain your top talent, you might want to re-think that. Benefits are important, but your people and their relationships to one another are what will decrease your turnover. You can start small and simple, perhaps by planning one “official” team-building activity a month or bringing your people together for some low-key fun every once in a while.

A focus on employee careers and helping your people connect with work-related passions will keep them too. The Glassdoor research cites professional development (32 percent) and meaningful work (22 percent) as the second and third characteristics most critical to a top-notch employment experience.

For the rest of Glassdoor's results, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Stop the Sleep Deprivation Madness

Travis Bradberry is the co-author of the bestselling book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, a provider of emotional intelligence tests and training. About a month ago, Travis published an eye-opening article on sleep and work function for Forbes. He confirmed what I’ve believed all along, which is that sleep is really important for high performers. Here are some of the reasons.

Sleepy People Are Dumber

Travis shared some data from the Division of Sleep Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, which said that the short-term productivity gains from skipping sleep to work are quickly washed away by the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on your mood and ability to focus, problem-solve, and access higher-level brain functions. The negative effects of sleep deprivation are so great that people who are drunk outperform those lacking sleep. Why is this? Travis cited a University of Rochester study, which found that when you sleep your brain removes toxic proteins from its neurons. When you don’t get enough sleep, the toxic proteins remain in your brain cells, impairing your ability to think and potentially derailing your career.

Sleepy People Miss Work

Travis remarked that sleep deprivation is linked to a variety of serious health problems, including heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. When it is sleep-deprived, your body overproduces cortisol, which wreaks havoc on the immune system. This causes you to get sick more frequently, and stay sicker longer. You’ll also experience a variety of aches and pains that may be enough to send you to the doctor or contagious symptoms that will force you out of the office. Either way, when you’re thinking about how terribly you feel physically, you’re not concentrating about work.

Sleepy People Are Dangerous

As we’ve suggested, sleep deprivation decreases mental accuracy. But for those who work in any kind of job in which reaction time is a factor, it’s also bad news. We see news stories all the time about pilots, manufacturing employees, etc., who get into serious accidents because they aren’t getting enough sleep. And if you commute, sleep deprivation could be enough to kill you. Falling asleep at the wheel is a major cause of driving-related fatalities.

Why else should you sleep now?  Check out the rest of my reasoning on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Will Your Company Soon Have an EPMO?

Recent research on project management indicates that the field is about to enter the spotlight. Once an isolated function, project management is quickly being elevated in strategic importance. According to analyst firm Gartner, by 2017 senior executives in the largest organizations in America will rely on enterprise program management offices (EPMOs) to execute projects in alignment with overall business strategy.

The business case is there, of course. An article in CIO Magazine by Moira Alexander of Conture Business Advisors cites Project Management Institute research illustrating that EPMOs are capable of significant ROI. Specifically, they are estimated to improve confirmation of business priorities and project alignment with strategic objectives by 10 percent.

If you wish to keep pace with your market and competition, it’s wise to adopt the EPMO model sooner rather than later. Paraphrased here are some initial ideas Moira Alexander recommends in her article.

Company-Wide Visibility

The principal role of an EPMO is to ensure that all business units are engaging in initiatives that are in line with the company’s vision. Therefore, it’s more important than ever that PMOs gain a seat at every table in the organization. By being everywhere at all times and by leading company-wide planning sessions in which they are able to communicate the organization’s direction, traditionally siloed PMOs become EPMOs that deliver greater value to the business.

High-Level Communication

EPMOs work closely with senior management from the very beginning so that all projects throughout the organization tie directly to business goals. They are instrumental in helping executives determine what matters to the organization and establish key performance indicators so that these priorities are measured and monitored properly.

This means that the executive management team must view the EPMO as a strategic partner that reports in directly and has full access, rather than just another business unit that happens to be project-based. Senior management and the EPMO should maintain an ongoing conversation so that business objectives and projects never fall out of alignment.

For more on the movement toward EPMOs, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Don't Let the Air Sandwich Kill Your Business

Nilofer Merchant has launched more than 100 products that netted $18 billion. In her 25 year career, she has gone from being an administrative assistant, to division leader, to CEO of Rubicon, to board member of a NASDAQ-traded company – gathering monikers such as the “Jane Bond of Innovation” along the way for her ability to guide organizations through seemingly impossible odds.

I interviewed Nilofer about her recent book, The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy and her concept of the “Air Sandwich.” Here are some of the highlights of our discussion.

Can you briefly tell us about the Air Sandwich? Why does this happen and what can we do about it?

Chances are, you’re already familiar with the concept of the Air Sandwich, if not the term itself. An Air Sandwich is what happens when a leader in an organization issues orders from 80,000 feet and lobs them to the folks at 20,000 feet, creating a large, empty void. That gap between the top and the bottom is an Air Sandwich, and just like two pieces of bread without the meat or fixings, this sandwich is missing all the stuff that matters: namely, feedback, debates, trade-off discussions. As long as we’re eating Air Sandwiches in our organizations, we lack the shared understanding necessary to achieve the kind of results our organizations need.

If a leader is accustomed to formulating strategy solo, or with the help of a few higher-ups, how can s/he get employees at all levels involved?

The fastest way to get all levels to play is to invite them. As in, send an email to as broad of a group as possible and say “we’re working on X, anyone interested in working on X is invited.” And then let them work together to figure out the problem that needs to be solved, and the options for solving it. It’s not a group hug scenario (not every vote is equal), but it is an opportunity to come to a shared understanding.

How can leaders make the leap from a great idea to a great strategy?

The best strategic idea means nothing in isolation. If the strategy conflicts with how a group of people already believe, behave, or make decisions, it will fail. Conversely, a robust team that believes in an idea fully can turn a so-so strategy into a marketplace winner. The HOW matters in how we get performance, and that’s why it’s necessary to invite people from all levels to take a seat at the table.

For the rest of Nilofer's interview, check out Intuit's Fast Track blog.

5 Ways to Increase Your Team's Well Being

You want your team members to be as happy and productive as possible. A little while ago, we talked about some easy wellness ideas you can implement. Here are other novel ways you might switch things up for the better.

Nix Email After 11PM

People who work all day generally need to sleep at night. If you want healthy and happy employees, don’t encourage them to be online at all hours. Tell your team, flat out, that they can do what they want with their own time but their manager and colleagues don’t want to hear from them after “curfew.” And whatever you do, don’t send email yourself after 11PM. This behavior is likely what started your team on it in the first place. Young employees in particular are vulnerable to pressure to work all the time and be available whenever their bosses are, and often try to one-up one another in this respect.

Rotate Seating

As I said last year, open offices need to go away. But that aside, you might also get rid of permanent seating arrangements. In the Wall Street Journal, Rachel Feintzeig interviewed Christian Catalini, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who studies workplace efficiency. Christian recently examined the impact of proximity at an academic campus in Paris. When scientists were shuffled around to different buildings because of an asbestos problem, the result was more experimentation and more breakthrough ideas. Changing up seating also prompted workers to meet, collaborate with, and form friendships with a greater variety of people. It keeps things interesting without sacrificing too much privacy.

Purchase FitBits

Devices like the FitBit, which track actions like steps walked and time slept, are surprisingly effective in nudging people toward new and better habits. Purchase FitBits for your whole team (they’re not that expensive) and launch a contest to track who walks the most steps in a week. The competition aspect will spur your employees to get out of their chairs more. Note: there are apps that track steps too, but because many women don’t carry their smartphones on their persons, the FitBit bracelet is more effective.

For more ways to be a more effective manager, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Don't Leave Home Without Them: 7 Pieces of Advice from Seth Godin

Seth Godin is one of the greatest business minds living today. I don’t believe that’s an exaggeration. I read his blog and here, summarized some of his best advice from the last year.

The thing about a clean sheet of paper

…is that it still has edges. It’s tempting to believe that creativity comes from starting fresh. But even when we start fresh, we approach projects and problems with self-created boundaries. You can’t do real work without edges, without something to leverage, but those edges don’t have to be the same edges as everyone else uses. Creative people often excel because they change the shape of the clean sheet.

You’re right, we were wrong

This is the most difficult sentence for companies that stumble in doing effective customer service. By effective, Seth means customer service that pays for itself, that is a rational expense on the way to building a loyal brand following and generating positive word of mouth.

When someone in your organization says, “You’re right, we were wrong,” they’re not saying that you’re always wrong, or that you were completely wrong, or even that, in a court of law with a sympathetic jury, you would lose. No, all you’re saying is that you made a promise or set an expectation and then failed to live up to it. Owning that and saying it out loud does two things: it respects the customer and it allows you to make more promises in the future.

Sign your work

We expect authors, painters and singers to identify themselves, to sign the work they do. What about managers, committee members, engineers and everyone else who makes something? Who made this policy? Who designed this menu? Who approved this project? If you’re not proud of it, don’t ship it. If you are, sign your work and own the results.

Crowding the pan

One thing you’ll discover when you start pan roasting brussel sprouts is that more is not always better. Sure you have three uncooked sprouts left, and it would be a shame to not serve them, but if you add those three to the pan with the others, the entire batch will suffer. Adding one more is just fine, until adding one more ruins everything. Greed costs.

Taking the plunge

Perhaps it’s better to commit to wading instead. Not the giant, life-changing, risk-it-all-venture, but the small. When you do a small thing, when you finish it, polish it, put it into the world, you’ve made something. You’ve committed and you’ve finished. And then you can do it again, but louder. And larger.

“Google it!”

The job is no longer to recite facts, to read the bio out loud, to explain something better found or watched online. No, the job is to personally and passionately make us care enough to look up the facts for ourselves. When you introduce a concept, or a speaker, or an opportunity, skip the reading of facts. Instead, make a passionate pitch that drives inquiry.

Put a frame around it

What’s worth more, the frame or the poster? It turns out that a well-framed graphic is often transformed, at least in the eyes of the person engaging with it. It might be the very same beautiful object that was thumbtacked to the wall, but it sure feels different. And an unwrapped piece of jewelry is worth far less without the blue box, isn’t it? The wrapper isn’t everything, it might not even be the point. But it matters.

For more Seth gems, check out the full post on Intuit's Fast Track blog.

SOS: Your Colleague is Making You Look Like A Loser

It’s a universal experience. You and a same-aged colleague with a similar background and education start out at identical places in your careers. It’s probably on the bottom rung. You know the same people, do the same things. And then one day, that colleague has something fantastic happen, like a major promotion or a high-profile mentorship. Maybe he plays his cards right, maybe it’s just a lucky break. But either way, his career is suddenly skyrocketing while yours is…not.

You’ve been lapped.

Colleague: 1. You: 0

It’s tough to know how to feel when this happens. One the one hand, you are happy for your colleague, who may even be your friend. But human nature being what it is, you’re also pissed off, resentful, and insecure because you’re evidently a no-talent loser while your colleague has turned your mutual experiences into gold.

It would be easy to stop trying, to accept that once you’ve been lapped once, it’s bound to happen again and again as your colleague gains momentum. It would be easy to sink into a depression because no matter what you do, your career will never sparkle and amaze in quite the same way.

That time when you dusted the people who once lapped you

Well, I’m here to tell you why being lapped isn’t the worst thing in the world. Let’s start with high school. Remember the people who lapped you then? They were the pretty jocks and cheerleaders, the kids for whom being a teenager was graceful and effortless. I’m sure you’ve heard the notion that in all likelihood, these sort of kids peak in high school and that it’s all downhill after graduation. They will never again be as successful in the game of life. While the nerds get rich with their tech start-up and winning stocks, the cool kids are working dead-end jobs and frequenting the same sports bars they hung out 20 years ago.

Similarly, the fact that someone has lapped you in your career now doesn’t mean that person is guaranteed to be ahead forever. Careers are a journey. This year could be your colleague’s high point, while next year might be yours.

So try to stop thinking of the situation as all or nothing (i.e. now that she got that promotion I’ll never catch up) and realize that this could be a golden opportunity to challenge yourself and find a way to be on top. There’s nothing that fuels motivation more than a little competition, and your colleague’s sprint ahead could in fact be just the incentive you need. It may just give you the courage, for instance, to ask your boss what you need to do to perform at a higher level.

For the rest of my advice on surviving getting lapped, head over to Intuit's Fast Track blog.

Online Marketing Shouldn't Cost a Mint

Jason Seiden is a hustler. You know, the good kind. The kind that can make things happen through sheer will, gumption, and thoughtful innovation. Jason, an online marketing expert, is making waves these days with the launch of BrandAmper – a SaaS application that improves the quantity, quality, and consistency of employee brand advocacy.

I sat down to get Jason’s ideas about how regular folks like you and me, who don’t count marketing as a primary responsibility and have minimal financial and time resources, can start an effective grassroots online marketing program.

Alex: So Jason, I’m not a big brand with deep pockets. It this even possible?

Jason: Possible?! Who started the rumor that online marketing requires a major marketing budget? The reason online marketing looks expensive is because the media tends to feature tools built to accommodate massively scaled consumer marketing programs with the goal of turning complete strangers into fans.

But if you start with loyal employees – people who already chose to work for you – your probability of success skyrockets. The data on starting with employees is compelling: employees are almost 6X more trusted than company spokespeople  and when you activate employees as ambassadors, you get immediate feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

Alex: But how do you win over employees so they want to be spokespeople?

Jason: First, make sure leadership is on board. They may be gray-haired digital immigrants, but they still set the tone, and it’s important that they lead by example. Second, make sure your employees have guidelines to follow. Has marketing ever created conversational treatments of your brand? Can an employee explain the company’s vision to a friend without sounding like a robot? Finally, activate your employees by running an internal communications campaign that gives them a reason to care, and then inviting them to sessions that show them how to convert their interest into action.

Alex: You’ve seen lots of big brands spend a fortune on marketing. What are the most important lessons we can take away without having to make the same mistakes?

Jason: One lesson we see over and over is that reach is nothing without resonance. All those retweets that no one cares about? Spam. All those likes you bought with the promise of a free iPad? Useless. When companies start with online marketing, they almost always chase that shiny viral object. They buy all these tools and content management platforms and measuring dashboards, and all anyone is measuring is how little people are engaging.

So if you’re just starting, skip that shiny object step. Start with your strategy, figure out what matters to you, put blinders on to everything else, and then blog and tweet and post and engage about that one thing until your fingers bleed.

For the rest of Jason's interview, have a look at Intuit's Fast Track blog.