Administrative teams are the backbone of any organization. The stronger the administrative team, the smoother the daily operations will be for everyone in the team. But while your organization’s administrative team is the glue that holds your overall operations together, they need to feel supported, too.
How Important Is It to Support Your Admin Team
It’s very important to make your admin teams feel supported, as they ensure that the little problems don’t pile up and become a big hurdle to your growth. While others might think that admin teams only make menial contributions to the organization, they actually play critical roles.
Imagine a day in the organization without them. Some, if not all, important scheduled meetings may slip the minds of executives and many others. Without someone reminding executives to call or visit old and potential business partners, your organization may experience immense loss. Logistics can also be costly and difficult with no one monitoring your systems. A full week without an admin team for your organization would be chaotic, and may range from nearly a week to a month’s worth of losses.
Hence, making your administrative staff feel valued and investing in them could pay dividends, as these team members contribute to efficiency and effectiveness across the organization. In turn, this results in improved profits, higher employee morale, along with employee engagement and retention.
So how do you support and build a strong administrative team? Let’s start with investing in employee training and development.
How To Start Supporting Your Administrative Team
Although spending on training and team-building activities may seem costly, these programs help develop high-performing employees in your administrative team. To get you started, below are some training programs you can employ to better support your administrative team.
1. Training Programs
Various employee training programs will help your administrative team have more profound knowledge of their job functions and help improve their skills. These training programs allow them to perform with greater productivity and effectiveness. These can also help them master the ethos and culture of your organization.
- Leadership Training
This type of training hones your administrative team’s skills in conflict resolution and problem-solving. Administrators who know how to take charge, and solve issues quickly and efficiently can be confident in unleashing their leadership potential.
- Technical Training
This training shapes your administrative team’s love for technology and keeping up to date with the latest trends in tech. Often, information systems have updates that may make it difficult for your employees to navigate the new changes. Thus, regularly engaging your team in technical training makes their skillset future-proof.
- Soft Skills Training
Perhaps one of the most overlooked training programs involves enhancing a team’s set of soft skills. This type of training empowers your employees and helps them build on their personal development goals parallel to your organization’s goals. While it hones their decision-making skills similarly to leadership training, this is a more focused training for other specific soft skills, such as stress management.
- Team Training
Regular team training often improves the dynamic and interpersonal network among employees. As your team enhances their general admin skills and knowledge, they also develop a better ability to work as a team, building camaraderie through tasks, activities, and seminars. Because the administrative team’s duties and responsibilities are interconnected, team training can help keep them in sync.
2. Team Building
Sometimes, taking a load off is just what your administrative team might need to clear their head and improve their mood. Team building activities can assist not only with that, but also improving the relationships within your team and their overall dynamic. They boost morale and interpersonal relationships among your administrative team. These activities may result in higher employee retention and lower employee turnover.
3. Communication Activities
Activities under this category often involve games like charades, challenging your employees’ communication abilities. They also serve as icebreaker activities that helps form new friendly bonds among the team. These communication activities help warm up your administrative staff with one another and could even resolve internal conflict.
4. Problem-Solving and Decision-Making Activities
There are fun ways to improve your team’s problem-solving and decision-making abilities. For instance, The Great Egg Drop game engages your team’s coordination and critical thinking by finding an ingenious way to prevent an egg from shattering even after being dropped from a specific height. Aside from the skills mentioned earlier, this also helps build your employees’ creativity and capabilities to innovate.
5. Adaptability and Planning Activities
These activities challenge your employees to make do with limited resources. They develop your administrative team’s resourcefulness, adaptability, and planning abilities. Here, administrative teams are learn how to be flexible to your organization’s ever-changing status. One example is road mapping scenarios.
6. Trust-Building Activities
As the name suggests, trust-building activities like Mine Field help make your admin staff more comfortable with one another. Encouraging your employees to place their trust in colleagues helps reinforce their belief in each member of the team. They entrust their coworkers more with important or critical tasks.
Apart from training programs, we have also listed some bonus tips below to make your administrative team feel you support even more.
Work-Life Balance
A survey conducted in 2019 found that to build strong workplace teams, organizations must reassess their understanding of employee loyalty. Yes, employees are loyal to the organization, and they seek to work hard and use their skills to the maximum. However, they wouldn’t want to sacrifice their personal and family time.
By having an adequate work-life balance, participants (employees) stated that they can be more efficient and even better at what they do. Thus, ensuring that your administrative team has time for themselves and to tend to personal or family matters is imperative, as it can help to boost employee performance.
Empower Your Team
While it may often be easier to be civil in the workplace and do the bare minimum for employee empowerment (such as recognizing or praising their work), there are still many ways to empower your administrative team.
First, let them know they’ve earned your trust by giving them more autonomy over their tasks and projects. This may also mean accepting their ideas. Being receptive and accepting can give a morale and confidence boost to your team, allowing them to grow further.
Second, practice giving constructive feedback. While this may not be new advice, workplace stress and burnout can make it difficult to be kinder and more constructive when it comes to feedback. Nonetheless, practicing constructive feedback can empower your team..
Support Should Have Support
Like any other employees, your admin staff responds best when shown belief and a sense of importance. Happy employees are 13 percent more productive, and a reciprocate to displays of loyalty and care from their employers. Devoting time toward improving your administrative team’s knowledge and skills will undoubtedly improve your organization’s overall efficiency and effectiveness.
Supporting your admin teams well results in a domino effect: a strong administrative team that gives high performance to keep your business running. This ultimately proves that administrative team training programs can result in a quick return on investment. If you show support towards the employees who support your organization, much like a scaffold, it strengthens and fortifies them. This means it strengthens and fortifies your business.
GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN YOUR SUPPORT TEAM
Indeed, support teams need support, too. Keep these fun training programs and other support tips in mind when you redesign your support initiatives for your admin teams. These give them something to look forward to in terms of developing their skills and strengthening bonds within the team.
If you’re also looking for the best professionals for your admin staff to support your organization, you can partner with us at ACS Professional Staffing. We ensure applicants are efficient and motivated to keep learning through training and team-building methods to hone their skills. Get in touch with us today to find out more.