Growing up, everyone in my family worked at easily definable jobs. Police Officer, teacher, secretary, carpenter, nurse, chef, fire fighter, accountant. Come to think of it, I don’t think I even knew any adults that had a job like Kevin Arnold’s dad at NORCOM. So what do these people do?
As sort of a benchmark, on the show The Office what should Michael Scott be doing? Toby?
Speaking as an office manager, mostly administrative-type stuff. Accounts Receivable, Collections, making sure files are in order, scheduling, supplies, general record-keeping stuff.
Michael, as branch manager, would have to sign off on paychecks, for one. Um… performance evaluations on his employees… he also seems to make sales calls himself, sometimes. No doubt, some networking and maintaining relationships with clients… I don’t know if he would be in charge of maintaining the office itself - I think that would fall to Pam. In this case, I’m talking things like making sure there’s enough supplies, that computers are working, etc. The budget for that would fall under Michael’s discretion, however.
For other office jobs, it largely depends on the industry.
Two of the jobs listed in the OP: secretary and accountant, are office jobs. Someone like Michael would probably be in a lot of meetings. Basically, he should be making sure people are doing their jobs and have what they need to do their jobs well.
“Office work” or what is commonly referred to as “white collar” jobs (in reference to the white dress shirts often worn with a suit) typically consists of work that is, quite litterally, performed in an office. This is in contrast to “blue collar” work (in reference to the blue denim work shirts often worn) which tends to be more “hands on”, physical, dirtier and more dangerous and typically takes place in factories, construction sites or the street.
A common trope of “office work” consists people toiling at phones or computer screens in cramped cubicle farms. In the movies and TV, the desirability of the job is usually indicated by the loudness of the environment and the attractiveness of the workers and the style of the office. For example, the Dunder Miflin paper company in The Office contains marginally attractive to ugly workers in a mostly quiet (ignoring Michael Scott’s antics) environment in Scranton, PA. This indicates that it is an undesirable, nondescript, boring job. In contrast, a powerful law firm or investment bank would be filled with loud, brash men in power suits like in Boiler Room or Wall Street.
Ok, so what is “office work” in real life? In a general sense, most offices are places where information is collated and deseminated and business decisions are made. In the old days, much of this was done via paper and most office workers typically performed tasks related to the creation and distribution of those paper reports. Now most of it is done by computer networks so a large number of those workers exists to maintain and operate those computer systems.
Typically an office is broken up into functional departments. In a broad sense these departments typically consist of :
Sales, Marketing and Customer Service - People who figure out what to sell and how to sell it
Operations and IT - Running and maintaining office systems and networks
Accounting & Finance - Recording how money is spent and figuring out how projects are financed
Human Resources - Recruiting, benefits and dealing with people issues
Legal - The company lawyers
The Business - This is what the company actually does to make money. It could be architecture, CPA accounting, engineering, finance, law, whatever. Any sort of work that people do at a desk or computer.
There are a lot of highly specific sub groups as well, but this gives you a general idea of the functions.
Depending on its size and structure, an office may also be divided into functional business units organized by product, geography or whatever the company believes is most convenient.
Employees are typically organized by function and skill set in a pyramid or matrix. For example, in my last job I was a manager in the IT department of a Fortune 500 company. I had 4 project leaders who reported to me and I reported to a Director who reported to the Vice President of our department. He reported to subsequently more senior VPs, ultimately to an executive officer (CIO in our case). That is a pyramid.
When I worked for a consulting firm as a manager, I didn’t directly report to anyone. There was a Partner who ran our business unit which consisted of pools of Managers, Senior Associates and Associates who would be assembled into teams as needed.
Note that titles are specific to companies and are not consistent from company to company.
So what exactly do people do in an office? Well, as I said, a lot of it is compiling reports and other information for higher up decision makers to make decisions. Then it is taking those decisions and organizing people and resorces to run the business.
Take Dunder Mifflin from The Office for example (old org chart PDF)
Michael Scott is the branch manager of a paper company. He is responsible for leading an office that sells paper throught a region of the country (presumably eastern PA)
Jim, Andy, Dwight and a few others are the Sales team. Their job consists of building relationships with people who buy paper on behalf of their company. They would call up the office manager of law firms, schools, other companies and try to sell them Dunder Mifflen products. Ideally, those people would continue to call back or enter into arrangements with D-M to buy those products.
Angela, Oscar and others are the Accounting department. Their job is to record sales, make sure the clients pay their bills, track spending on office supplies and prepare financial statements for Michael. Michael would (presumably) look at these statments which should indicate the profitability of the office and the effectiveness of individual sales people.
Pam is the office Receptionist or Administrative Assistant. These used to be referred to as a “secretary”. Her role would typically be answering phones, greating visitors and posibbly ordering office supplies.
There are also several specific positions like “Supplier Relations”, “Quality Control” and so on which would have roles and responsibility specific to that business.
In the show, D-M has a corporate headquarters in NYC. From what we’ve seen, D-M has a number of Vice Presidents or equivalent, each who is responsible for a number of regional offices. The corporate HQ would be responsible for things like company-wide advertising and marketing campaigns (ie the website), consolidating regional office financial numbers into agregate reports and opening or closing regional offices.
Note that we do not see them actually MAKING paper. Presumably it is either made somewhere else or purchased wholesale from some sort of paper making company and then resold. There is a warehouse so we can assume the Scranton office also serves as a distribution center for the region. Those are more blue collar jobs and out of the scope of this discussion.
So that’s the 40,000 foot view of working in an office. There is actually a lot more to it, but that should give you a general idea.
In a productive business, some of the process of producing are done in factories, or studios, or foundries. In a small business, the same people who do the producing also take care of the details that are not an actual part of production. Things like obtaining raw materials, advertising the product, obtaining contracts for sales, making deliveries, collecting payments, making payments, filing for permits, paying taxes, investigating markets, and perhaps many other things, like patents, import laws, export laws, and many many other possibilities.
The economy of scale makes it really useful to segregate the most productive persons in the company from the non-productive tasks, when the balance of production is impeded by the time spent on support tasks. To do that, someone moves into an office, and begins to do much more of the support, and much less of production. Then, that person probably hires someone more experienced, and hopefully more talented in the tasks of support, and returns to production.
As the business expands, it probably becomes very much more competitive, trying to enter larger, or more diverse markets, and reduce production costs. Doing that is not just one task, or even one type of task. So, new people are hired, to do those new tasks, and the job begins to include dealing with large numbers of people, involved in large numbers of processes. Management skills are essential to make that system financially useful. So, you now have multiple production facilities, many people involved in product design, sales, research, licensing, personnel, finance, and dozens of other processes. All of these people work in offices, where they can keep records, maintain databases of information, and other things.
Offices are simply the places to do that, and office workers are the people who do it. They type memos, answer letters, initiate contracts, file them, examine the consequences of past decisions, suggest new strategies. They do these things with varying degrees of success, because they have variable degrees of skill, and motivation. Keeping track of that is the most important aspect of management.
Tris
That was a good explanation, msmith.
Office work, regardless of position or job title, is the quest to rearrange 1’s and 0’s on a hard drive somewhere, with the goal of achieving some semblance of what we call order, which is constantly changing on a daily basis.
As someone else mentioned, they really downplay the amount of meetings that would be held by Michael, which he would be in just about all 8 hours of the day. Meeting with each dept to make sure their quotas are being made, meeting with clients to negotiate more complex deals, offering advice on how to procede with certain things.
That’s what my office life to me is – my desk is more of a place where I leave my half empty cups of coffee and water.
I could see many scenes of Michael calling the same meeting over and over again because he doesn’t understand something, and the employees constantly reexplaining things.