secretaries

The Lazy Secretary

by Kat on 08/11/2011 · 66 comments

in Business Etiquette, Career, CoWorker Problems

How do you get a lazy secretary to work harder for you — or how do you complain about her to the Powers That Be without seeming petty? Reader E, a reader from New Zealand, has this very problem…

I share my secretary with my supervising partner, however he hardly uses her and often if she doesn’t have work to do for me she won’t do anything all day. She works part-time and has been a legal secretary for about 20 years.

She spends more time walking around the office talking to other staff than she does working. I dictate work for her to do that does not come back in a timely manner, instead she returns the dictated work just before she leaves (despite my requests for it throughout the day) so that if there are any changes to be made to work that needs to go out that day, I have to do it myself. Unfortunately, whilst everyone else in the office notices that she is lazy, my supervising partner either does not notice or doesn’t want to notice as he thinks that she is great.

Yesterday I asked her to do a simple task and as it was nearing the end of her working day she went over my head to my supervising partner and complained about doing it whilst I was in a meeting with a client, he told her that she didn’t have to do it and that it could wait till Monday! I can’t help but feel let down by him.

What should I do? I want to let him know how lazy she is but do not want to face a backlash from him.

We’ve talked before about delegating work to a secretary, but we haven’t talked about what to do with a bad secretary. This is a really, really tough question — I’ve been there and it is not a fun time. One of my favorite stories was from one of my friend’s secretaries, though: My friend handed a folder containing packets of neatly stapled papers (including a memo, legal decisions, web pages, and more) to her secretary and asks for 5 copies, original to A, copy to my friend, and the other 4 copies to B, C, D, and E. The secretary then went to the copy machine, removed all of the staples, and put the entire collection through the copier — which got jammed halfway through. She then tried to “recreate” the collection of the packets that my friend had handed to her. Let’s just say that everyone (from A-E) had a good laugh about the work product they received. (Yes, laughter: let’s hope it was that.)

To me, it’s a bit of a problem that the supervising attorney told her it could wait until Monday — you don’t say enough about the problem for me to get into it, but it sounds like either a) he already has a great relationship with his secretary (or even prefers her to you) in which case, complaining to him is going to get you nowhere, fast, b) he doesn’t think the work you’re giving her is important, in which case you might want to talk to him about it directly — not about how lazy the secretary is (because again, that will get you nowhere) but to understand whether 1) the work really is not that important, in which case, hey, enjoy your own weekend! or 2) this is the kind of work the firm expects you to do by yourself. Either you have a secretary to do secretary’s work or you don’t.

That said… as I see it, you have a few options here.

Be very clear with your secretary. Instead of saying, “Please type this document as soon as possible,” say “I really need this document typed by 12:30. Will that be a problem?” This way, if what she gives you requires changes, you can ask her to do those by the end of the day.

Do the work yourself. Since my friend told me the story above, I’ll admit, my own response to a bad secretary has just been to do the work myself. I’ve copied, typed, redlined, and more.

See what other options your company offers for support staff. For example, if you need something typed, red-lined, or grammar-checked, give it to the Steno Department rather than to your secretary. If you need something copied, give it to Duplicating instead of your secretary.

Move offices. Frequently secretaries are assigned based on where you sit; you could possibly get a new secretary by simply changing offices. It isn’t a perfect world — you have to take the time to move your office — but I’ve known people who’ve done this to get away from a bad secretary.

Talk to your secretary. I’ve had to do this once — one of my secretaries had a few weeks where absolutely nothing she did seemed to be right and, after a pretty large screw-up, I sat her down and tried to come from a place of concern — I’ve noticed your mind is elsewhere lately, and I wondered if I could ask if anything is going on outside of the office? As it turned out, yes, a lot of stuff was going on in her home life with her children. I expressed my concern and eased up on her for a while, and I felt like we came out of the incidences with a much stronger assistant/employer relationship. In your situation, you might want to sit your secretary down — strive to understand her. I’d make out a list of bullet points that you want to get across to her — for example, the reason that it isn’t acceptable for her to give you something as she runs out the door, or why her delay in Project A affected your work in X, Y, and Z ways. Did she have other work that day that you’re not aware of? Is it a communication problem — did she not understand that you needed it done in a certain way? It can be difficult but as long as you come at it from a place of understanding (and not one of anger or blame) then I think it’s worth a shot — at least, before the next option, which is:

Talk to your boss about her. To me, this would be the last resort — particularly given the facts you cite above (they’ve been working together for a long time, he let her take off early on a Friday and absolved her of work you had given her, etc.) I think you need to be really realistic about what is likely to happen, as well as what you want to happen. For example: Do you want her fired? There’s no guarantee the new one will be any better, and you’ll be known as the one at the office who gets secretaries fired. Do you want a different secretary, say, X from down the hall? Ask HR discreetly if you can change it up — say you get along so much better with her, you’ve heard amazing things about her, et cetera.

Readers, what is your advice to Reader E about bad assistants and lazy secretaries? How have you handled the situation in the past?

{ 66 comments }

Delegating: Using Your Assistant Well

by Kat on 04/26/2011 · 171 comments

in Business Etiquette, CoWorker Problems, Organization, Success

Reader E wonders what you can and should ask your assistant or secretary to do — and what is off limits. Great question!

I have been fortunate and I find myself a busy exec at a consulting firm at a young age. I am working 60-80 hours a week and just learning how to leverage my assistant. She is helping me with my expenses and time entry, but I suspect she and I could both get more out of the relationship. I’ve grown up in a world where I can do almost everything myself (like book travel) but I’m struggling to manage my work/life balance. I could use help with just about anything but as I dive into the world of asking for help, I don’t want to find myself at the other end of the spectrum where I’m asking too much or being inappropriate. Advice that outlines do and do not categories or mentions creative ideas might be most helpful.

Congrats to be a busy exec, and a special congrats on getting what sounds like a competent and helpful assistant — they can be hard to come by, so treat him or her like gold! (And apologies in advance for every time I say “her” meaning the assistant — in addition to being Reader E’s situation, it’s easier to type than “him or her” every time!) (Pictured: Screencap from Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. We’re right on top of it, Rose!) Oh, and PSA: Don’t forget that tomorrow is Administrative Assistant’s Day. Check out our poll on what to get your assistant.)

For my $.02, you can delegate the following sorts of things to your assistant, depending on your job:

1) Expenses / time sheets / other simple data entry. This is what most people will use their secretaries and assistants for, and in some companies — particularly where an assistant is shared between four or five people — that may be all that he or she is asked to do.

2) Grunt work like photocopying, mailing, faxing, scanning, even typing things that can’t be OCR’d (or proofreading things that have been OCR’d).

3) Liaison activities. This is where your assistant will start to be more useful to you: have him or her act as a liaison with colleagues, clients, and opposing parties, to schedule conference calls, meetings, and more. Give her access to your calendar (there are ways you can set up a “shared” calendar in Outlook, if memory serves, that lets you only show her *some* of your activities — same with Google Calendar) so she doesn’t have to run in to check with you every time.

4) Filtering. You can absolutely ask your assistant to screen calls and even emails. In fact, with a lot of senior people it’s difficult to get an email to your target without having it filtered by the assistant first. (I once worked with a Big Wig who, in addition to needing filtering, just wasn’t comfortable with email yet — his assistant got all of his emails and would print out the important ones, and he would then scribble a response on the printout and hand it back to his assistant to be typed.) Depending on what your work entails, you can even have him or her skim different publications and flag any stories that might be of interest to you. For example, when I was 22 and a very junior editorial assistant at a magazine, I read 30 magazines on a weekly basis for the EIC and flagged different stories that I thought might be of interest to her, either for a story idea for our publication or from a “you should know what our competitor is doing” perspective– similarly, I now have my virtual assistant read a lot of the RSS feeds that end up in the Weekly Roundup.

5) Dictation/transcription. I truly believe that there is a lost art to dictation, and I never quite mastered it, try as I might. As a lawyer, I primarily found it helpful when I had been reviewing cases, treatises, and other documents like deposition transcripts and more where I would find big chunks of text that I wanted to use in the draft of whatever I was writing but didn’t want to type them — so I would dictate them. I tried it both with my assistant at the time and the speech-recognition transcription program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and there is a learning/teaching curve to both. Personally, I found Dragon more helpful because I could see what I had said aloud almost immediately which made proofreading easier, whereas with my assistant it may have been a few days before I saw the transcribed notes. I’ll also note that transcription jobs can vary in difficulty: if you’re writing a one-page letter using simple, regular words it’s going to be a lot easier than if you’re taking notes on an arcane area of law with a lot of terms of art, or if, say, your consulting work involves medical or pharmaceutical terms or acronyms.

6) Research for work-related things. For example, let’s say you need to create a number of posters for a presentation — your assistant can call Kinkos and see what the deadline is, what format the image files need to be in, what the cost variations are, and so forth. Similarly, if you’re having a work-related lunch you can have your assistant call different restaurants to see who has a table available at a certain time or date; same for work-related travel arrangements.

7) Things your assistant thinks she can do that will assist your professional life. If you’re dealing with an assistant who handles everything you give him or her very well, take her out to lunch to thank her, and talk about how you can better use the relationship. For example: “You’ve done an amazing job with everything I’ve given you, and I can tell that you’re capable of more. What else have you done in the past? What else might you think that I could give you to do?” Your assistant might also use this opportunity to tell you what jobs she hates doing, or what she wants out of the relationship (maybe she’s studying to do what you do in the future; maybe she wants more flexibility with her schedule, like longer lunches or earlier nights) — listen to her, and if you can, accommodate her on at least one or two items.

Things NOT to ask your assistant to do:
1) Personal tasks. At least in most situations that I’ve been in or witnessed, the secretary/assistant’s job is not one of personal assistant. You should not task her with things that have no relation to the job at hand: booking vacation flights for you, picking up a box of tampons, or even getting you coffee on a regular basis. (Although, if a client came to your office, I wouldn’t hesitate to ask your assistant to get the client a cup of coffee.) If you have that rare assistant who is happy to get you a cup of coffee on a regular basis, or is willing to pick up personal items for you at the drugstore — again, treat him or her like gold: I view all of that stuff as “above and beyond.”

2) Anything that crosses into YOUR job. For example, it’s one thing to have your assistant print out pages from 5-10 different websites or scan/photocopy pages that will help you do an analysis for your job — it’s another thing to ask your assistant to do a rough draft of that analysis herself.

Readers, what else do you use your assistants or secretaries for? What do you consider off limits in terms of secretarial tasks?

{ 171 comments }