Hello there

I work for Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire and I've recently completed a 2 year project to produce Good Admin Practice guides for use by all our staff.  One of these was snappily titled "Managing Diaries and Arranging Meetings".

If anyone wants a copy of it, please email me at lindsay.foody@kirklees.gov.uk.

It is, as you'd guess, very specific to the Kirklees (so the tips for using the email system relate specifically to GroupWise) but the principles are the same for anyone.

It covers all the essentials for preparing for meetings, such as dates, times, duration, resources required, attendee lists, budgets and gives advice on confirming arrangements, choosing layouts, signposting meetings, etc.

Hello all

Any thoughts on how to address a letter to a married couple?  Do you still use the husband's initial, ie  Mr and Mrs A Foody, or would you use both the husband's and wife's initials, ie  Mr A and Mrs L Foody?

What's the "correct" way of doing this?

Cheers

Lindsay

How do I say no without being rude to a colleague if they have asked me to do a piece of work for them when I am too busy, but they would like it ASAP?

Edited by linzfoody on 08/03/07 02:03 PM.

As far as covering for people who aren't in the office, I think it's helpful to have agreements in place about who's covering for who, when and what the extent of their cover will be.  And to share the load in a fair and consistent way.

As for answering questions, etc, I think it's really important to help out - you never know what you might learn in the process!

Here at Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire, we've just completed a knowledge sharing project called "good admin practice" which has pulled together good practice across a range of admin duties, such as providing reception services, diary management, email management (of both your own and your boss's accounts), purchasing, producing documents, using office equipment, providing project support, handling mail, etc.

There is loads of info available both corporately and within individual Service areas, and this project has drawn it together from an administrator's point of view.  One of the ways we captured good practice was by creating an Admin User Group which has reps from all the different Service areas in the Council.  The Group has met quarterly since September 2004 and at the meetings we share good practice, discuss admin related issues, review the guidance we have put together as part of the project.  Now the project has ended, we have moved in the maintenance phase; each of the 11 guides produced will be review annually - the Admin User Group will be central to that.

We are now applying the tools and techniques used in the Good Admin Practice Project within other knowledge sharing projects in the Council.

If anyone's interested in knowing more, please get in touch with me at lindsay.foody@kirklees.gov.uk

I work for a local authority in Yorkshire and we are currently in the planning stages for 2 admin events this year - the first in November 2006 and the second in March 2007.

Plans are to have 100 admin/clerical/secretarial staff at each, and run 6 hour long workshops three times each, so attendees can go to 3 different ones.  We are covering subjects such as career development; healthcare (focussing on posture, being active at work, eating healthily, etc); information management (records management/retention and disposal, dealing with Freedom of Information requests, etc); performance reviews.  We are also having a "problem-solving surgery" session and one relating to a knowledge-sharing project which I was managing and have just closed called "Good Admin Practice" (GAP) through which we defined and developed good practice relating to 11 areas of admin work to help admin staff work in a more efficient, consistent and customer focused way.  The workshop relating to GAP will go into the tools we used to develop the good practice and put together a network of administrators to help do this.

We hope the day will be an enjoyable one for admin staff - we're providing lunch and, hopefully, having a motivational speaker - and that they'll benefit by having some practical information and tools to take away with them from the sessions and by feeling valued and empowered.  The event in November is to be opened by our Chief Executive and closed by the Leader of the Council, which I think will be fantastic.

I'll let you know how it goes!

We do not subscribe to the theory of the paperless office.  Certain information needs to be kept in hard copy for legal / evidential reasons.  

However, effective records management (including use of retention schedules) mean that fewer paper records are kept (ie  the right ones), but it will not remove them completely.

Does anyone have any good practice tips for admin staff who provide reception services, including:

* dealing face-to-face with visitors to the office
* telephone reception
* "remote" reception (ie where there is a controlled door entry system with intercom/buzzer)

Thanks

Lindsay