Being an office administrator in a medical office can be exhausting.
There are distractions causing managers and their staff to experience extreme fatigue and actually cause loss of valuable work time. Common workplace distractions include:
Workers talking loudly:
Whether staff members are talking on the phone, talking to each other or in an impromptu meeting in the hall, loud voices carry and can be very distracting. It is perfectly acceptable to ask those with the loud voices to please take their conversation into a conference room. It is not rude to ask those who consistently speak loudly on the phone to please lower their voices.
Unnecessary meetings:
Spending inordinate amounts of time in meetings takes away time that could be spent on necessary tasks. Common complaints from office staff are that there are too many meetings, some of them are unnecessary, and some could be combined with others so there would be fewer meetings. The office administrator should pay attention to these complaints and work to combine meetings so there are fewer of them and they take up less time overall.
Office managers have trouble getting work done due to too many interruptions:
Statistics show that every eight minutes, an office manager is interrupted. The phone rings, an employee has a question, there is another fire of some type calling for the administrator to put it out. In order to accomplish tasks uninterrupted, mangers should designate times when they will not take phone calls or open email. During this time, unless a situation is absolutely critical and needs immediate attention, staff should learn not to interrupt the manager for routine questions or problems.
Workers asking too many questions of the office manager:
There is a time for a staff member to ask questions, and a time for staff members to look up their own answers. Office managers often put up with this distraction because it sometimes seems easier than sending staff members to find the answers for themselves. In the long run, teaching them how to find their own answers saves the manager from interruptions and teaches staff members how to independently figure things out.
