Office management is the administration of a company's own office: the supplier and service contracts and when they renew, the equipment and furniture the company owns and who holds it, the office's written procedures, the desk a starter needs on Monday, and the move when the lease ends. In a company of five to two hundred people there is usually no facilities department and no office services team; one person holds all of it alongside another job. The US Department of Labor's own occupational description of the role is almost that list: plan, direct or coordinate one or more administrative services of an organization, such as records and information management, mail distribution, and other office support services. This page sets out what the job covers, the five records it runs on, and where it stops and building maintenance begins.
Office management meaning, as the job is actually held
Not a title, a set of obligations. Somebody has to know which supplier contracts renew this quarter, what the company owns and where it is, who has the spare keys, what the procedure is when a starter arrives, and what happens to any of it when the office moves. Office management is holding those obligations in a form somebody else could pick up. The test of whether it is being done is not how busy the office manager looks; it is whether a second person could answer any of those questions from a record rather than from them.
The five records the job runs on
Suppliers and service contracts with their renewal dates, because an auto-renewing contract nobody diarised is the most common avoidable cost in a small office. The equipment and furniture the company owns, with who holds each item, which is the only thing that makes a leaver's handback checkable. The office's own written procedures, so a cover or a successor can run the week. The starter and leaver list, which is the procedures record applied to a date. And the move plan, dormant until the lease ends and then the only thing standing between the company and a lost filing cabinet.
What an office management system has to do, and the seven controls that say so
The question is not which product has the longest feature list, it is whether the record survives the person who made it. The US National Archives sets out seven controls a system holding records has to provide: reliability, authenticity, integrity, usability, content, context and structure. Read as a shopping test for a small office that is: can the record be trusted as a full account of what happened, is it protected from quiet alteration, is there an audit trail, can it be found and read again, does it keep what the author actually wrote, does it show what it relates to, and does it hold its shape. A shared spreadsheet passes the first and fails most of the rest, which is the honest reason to move off one.
Office management solutions, and where the category divides
The products sold for this job split three ways and the split matters more than the brand. There are records products, which keep contracts, assets and procedures. There are workflow products, which run the starter, leaver and request routines. And there are workplace products, which are about desks, rooms, visitors and floor space, and are a different buyer's: the workplace manager deciding how much floor the company needs is not the administrator holding the contracts. A small office usually needs the first and some of the second, and buys the third by mistake.
Where office management stops and building maintenance begins
The dividing line is the object. If the thing that needs attention is an asset on a schedule, a plant room, an air handler, a boiler, a lift, then the record wanted is an asset register, a preventive schedule and a work order, which is what this site is built for. If the thing is a contract, a piece of furniture, a procedure or a person's first day, that is office management. Federal facility rules keep the same line: the building services an agency has to provide are listed as custodial, waste, heating and cooling, grounds, minor repairs and building maintenance, which are all services delivered to the office rather than the administration of it. Most small companies need both records and mistake one for the other until the first thing goes wrong.
Questions people ask about office management
Is office management the same as facilities management?
No. Facilities management runs the building and its services for the people in it. Office management runs the company's own administration inside it: contracts, equipment, procedures and people. A company with one office usually has one person doing parts of both.
What are office management systems, as distinct from a shared drive?
A system keeps the record against the company with a date, an owner and a history. A shared drive keeps files. The difference shows the first time somebody asks when a contract renews and the answer has to be found rather than read.
Does a twenty person company need to buy a product for this?
It needs the five records. Whether they live in a product or a well-kept spreadsheet depends on whether a second person has to read them. The moment somebody other than the author needs an answer, the spreadsheet starts costing more than it saves.
Who does office management report to?
Usually the owner, the finance lead or operations. The reporting line matters less than whether the renewal dates and the asset list are somewhere other than in one person's head.