a) Office Staff

Whether you are in a small school and your only office staff is a secretary, or you are in a large school with several secretaries and clerks handling registration, attendance, tardies, budget, facilities bookings, student data management, report cards, trancripts, career testing and advisement, etc., the premise of service to the school and community remains the same. Everyone on your broadly defined office and leadership team must be aware of your commitment to serve your clients (students, staff, parents, community members) with good will, good humor, patience, and clarity.

What does this look like? And how do your office staff acquire a clear understanding of what it looks like? The most effective way to grow an effective office team is to give them the time to discuss these concepts, to agree on what exemplary service looks like in their area, and to make a commitment to developing that exemplary environment.

A meeting to discuss these things might have a five-part agenda to do a gap analysis as follows:

Part 1: What does an ideal, service oriented, office environment look like? What do people do and say? How do they handle complaints? solve problems? (Put all of the ideas up on a board so that people can see what they are creating.) (15-30 minutes)
Part 2: What does our own office environment look like? What do we do and say? How do we handle complaints? solve problems? (Put all of the ideas up on a board so that people can see how they see themselves; people may have great fun laughing at some of the things they do.) (15-30 minutes)
Part 3: Make a list of the gaps between the ideal environment that the group has defined and the actual existing environment. (10-20 minutes)
Part 4: Have the group discuss what they need to do to make things better for themselves and others. Have them decide what they can commit to for the next month and how they will determine their own success at the end of the month. (15-30 minutes)
Part 5: Set up next steps, including the date that they will meet again to assess their progress toward creating that exemplary work/office environment. This follow-up step is super important. (5-10 minutes)

This could be a very productive hour-long meeting (two hours if you have the time and they get into it). Unleash the creativity of the people around you and they will surprise you with what they can do. And they will be surprised by how much fun they can have doing it.