How to Increase Productivity for Your Admin Staff

Administrative staff are often expected to keep a business running while simultaneously dealing with everything that does not fit neatly into anybody else's job.

Invoices need processing. Customers need answers. Documents need filing. Meetings need arranging. Records need updating. Managers need reports. Somebody cannot find a contract from three years ago and, somehow, that becomes an urgent problem too.

It is hardly surprising that administrative teams can be extremely busy without always feeling productive.

The answer is rarely to ask people to work faster.

Real productivity comes from removing unnecessary work, making information easier to find and creating processes that do not require employees to solve the same problems repeatedly.

Done properly, improving administrative productivity can reduce costs while making the working day considerably less frustrating.

Start By Finding Where The Time Actually Goes

Before introducing new software or reorganising the office, find out what administrative staff spend their time doing.

The results may be surprising.

A task that management assumes takes ten minutes may consume several hours every week because information has to be gathered from different departments. Employees may be entering the same customer details into three systems. Reports may be manually assembled even though most of the information already exists elsewhere.

Ask staff where they lose time.

This is important because the people doing the work generally know exactly which processes are inefficient.

Look particularly closely at repetitive tasks, duplicate data entry, approval processes, document searches and work that depends on somebody chasing another employee for information.

Improving one task performed 50 times a week can be far more valuable than completely redesigning something that happens twice a year.

Give Information A Proper Home

Few things waste administrative time more reliably than information being stored everywhere.

A contract is in somebody's inbox. An updated spreadsheet is on a shared drive. The latest customer details are in the CRM, except for the information somebody wrote down during a phone call.

The problem gets worse as the company grows.

Businesses should decide where different types of information belong and then be disciplined about putting them there.

Customer information should have an agreed home. Contracts should be stored consistently. Staff documents, supplier information and financial records should follow clear systems rather than individual preferences.

This is not particularly exciting, but it makes an enormous difference.

Searching for information feels like work because somebody is busy while doing it. In reality, it produces nothing.

The easier information is to locate, the more time administrators can spend doing something useful with it.

Fix The Process Before Automating It

Automation can dramatically improve productivity, but there is little value in automating a bad process.

Imagine an invoice currently requires five unnecessary approvals before it can be paid. Automating those five approvals may make the process faster, but asking whether all five are necessary could make it faster still.

Before buying software, map out how important administrative jobs are currently completed.

What starts the process?

Who handles it?

Who needs to approve it?

Where is information entered?

Where does the process normally stall?

Then remove unnecessary steps.

A good rule is to simplify first and automate second.

Otherwise, businesses risk spending money to perform unnecessary work more efficiently.

Use Specialist Software For Specialist Administrative Work

Some administrative tasks become inefficient because the business has outgrown general-purpose tools.

Accounting provides a good example.

A company with a small number of simple leases may be able to manage information manually. Once the lease portfolio becomes larger, however, administrators and finance teams can find themselves maintaining spreadsheets, checking dates, calculating schedules and preparing information for reporting and audits.

This is where specialist platforms such as LeaseQuery, powered by FinQuery, can become useful.

LeaseQuery centralises lease information and can automate areas including amortisation schedules, journal entries and disclosure reports. It supports accounting requirements including IFRS 16 and FRS 102, while keeping lease information together rather than distributed across spreadsheets and documents.

The wider lesson applies well beyond lease accounting.

Software is most valuable when it removes a repetitive administrative burden or reduces the risk associated with managing complicated information manually.

The aim should not be to give employees more systems to maintain. It should be to find systems that remove work from their desks

Reduce The Number Of Interruptions

One of the biggest enemies of administrative productivity is fragmentation.

An employee begins reconciling a report. An email arrives. Somebody asks a question. The telephone rings. A manager wants a document immediately. Ten minutes later, the employee returns to the original task and has to work out where they were.

Repeat that throughout the day and an enormous amount of attention is lost.

Not every interruption can be prevented, particularly in customer-facing roles, but businesses can reduce unnecessary ones.

Internal questions can be grouped through agreed channels rather than scattered across email, chat and verbal requests. Non-urgent requests can have realistic response expectations instead of everything being treated as immediate.

It can also help to give staff protected periods for work requiring concentration.

An administrator who gets two uninterrupted hours may accomplish more than one who spends an entire day being constantly available.

Create Templates For Work That Repeats

Businesses regularly waste time creating the same thing from scratch.

Emails to new customers, meeting agendas, supplier requests, onboarding documents, reports and internal forms are obvious examples.

If something is produced repeatedly, create a good version once.

Templates do more than save typing. They improve consistency and reduce the chance that important information is forgotten.

The same principle applies to checklists.

A new employee joining the company may require accounts, equipment, payroll information and training. Rather than expecting somebody to remember every step, create a repeatable onboarding checklist.

Simple systems are often the most effective productivity tools available.

Make Ownership Obvious

Administrative work slows down considerably when nobody knows who is responsible for making a decision.

A document waits for approval because three managers could theoretically approve it. A customer enquiry is forwarded between departments. A supplier issue sits unanswered because everybody assumes somebody else owns it.

Clear responsibility removes this uncertainty.

For recurring processes, employees should know who owns the task, who can approve it and who needs to be consulted.

The difference between responsibility and involvement matters.

Ten people may need information about a project. That does not mean ten people should be involved in every administrative decision concerning it.

Automate The Handoffs

Some of the easiest productivity gains occur between systems rather than within them.

Perhaps every new website enquiry has to be copied into the CRM manually. Maybe information from an approved order has to be re-entered into another system before somebody can raise an invoice.

These are ideal candidates for automation.

Where systems can integrate securely, information entered once should ideally flow to the places where it is genuinely needed.

This has two benefits.

The obvious one is time.

The less obvious one is accuracy. Every time somebody manually copies a number, name or address, there is another opportunity for an error.

Good automation removes both the task and the possibility of getting it wrong.

Measure Output, Not Busyness

Finally, businesses need to be careful about how they judge administrative productivity.

A full inbox is not evidence of productivity. Neither is somebody staying at their desk late every evening.

Ask instead whether work is being completed accurately and on time.

How quickly are customer enquiries resolved? How long does an approval take? How many invoices require correction? How long does month-end work consume? How often are employees searching for missing information?

These measures reveal whether the underlying system is improving.

They also prevent a common mistake: rewarding visible busyness while ignoring efficient employees who quietly finish their work.

Better Productivity Usually Means Less Work, Not Faster Work

The most productive administrative department is not necessarily the one working at the greatest speed.

It is the one doing the least unnecessary work.

Information can be found without searching through inboxes. Routine tasks follow established processes. Repetitive work is automated where sensible. Specialist software handles complexity that would otherwise live in spreadsheets. Employees understand who is responsible for what.

None of those improvements require staff to type faster or answer more emails per hour.

They make the business easier to administer.

And that should ultimately be the objective.

As a company grows, administrative work will inevitably increase. The challenge is making sure it does not increase at exactly the same rate as the business.

When good processes, sensible technology and clear responsibilities are in place, the same administrative team can often support a much larger organisation without becoming overwhelmed.

That is productivity worth pursuing.