Honoring Administrative/Secretary’s Day

Appreciate your professional administrative secretary that has helped you get the job done in your business.  They certainly are working with deadlines, making phone calls, appointments for clients, patients, residents, other vendors, making sure your typing is done, grammar is correct, filing, and having to listen to you talk about how much work you have to get done while they are faciliating “getting the job done.”

I’ve been working closely with my front desk salon coordinators on a mammoth project that doesn’t seem to end. We celebrate with high fives when we get through minimal phases. We are updating our salon software that has exposed every single inconsistency from a standard version that wasn’t a problem before but now is a glaring light beam.Once “we” get  this problem cleaned up, it will be smooth sailing for all of our front desk coordinators, our customers, and for me. I can’t wait. Frankly, I don’t have the time in a day to get this done myself. I truly appreciate all of the efforts from my team to get this project off our task list.

Alex T. Front desk coordinator at our East Market location

As a business owner, I speak for all owners and managers, we get caught up in the big picture of our business operations that we are not considering all of the secretaries, adminstrative professionals that help us clean up our brilliant ideas.

I admit that when these problems are exposed, our administrative professionals really want to tell us, “I’ve been telling you about this for months.” Well, this day on April 27, 2016 is all about celebrating you for telling us and we didn’t listen. I’ll say that we want to listen and we actually do, its just that we prioritize these things until they become a priority. This whole idea of honoring Adminstrative Professionals is about appreciation of all the hardwork they do for us.

Who created Administrative/Secretary’s Day?

National Professional Secretaries Week and National Secretary’s Day was created  in 1952 through the work of Harry F. Klemfuss of Young and Rubicam. Klemfuss recognized the importance and value of the position to a company or business. His goal was to encourage more women to become secretaries. Using his skill and experience in public relations, Klemfuss, promoted the values and importance of the job of secretaries. In doing so, he also created the holiday in recognition of the importance of secretaries.

The name of this special day has changed and evolved over the past few decades. But, the importance of recognizing these vital individuals remains. The two new terms in use today are: “Administrative Professionals” and “Executive Admins”. The two names sometimes mean different roles and responsibilities in different companies and organizations. Both are broader terms, that encompass more positions than the original “Secretary” role.

The name change recognizes and acknowledges that the role has changed significantly since 1952, and for the better at that. In Harry Klemfuss’ day, these positions were the realm of women. Today, you find males in these positions. Being a secretary was a prestigious position in the 50’s. Now, it’s more of a business position with clout and the “gatekeeper” to the owner.

The most common ways of recognizing your Administrative Professional(s) today are:

• Flowers
• Cards, often with shopping gift certificates
• Indulge Salon gift cards from $25 – $100
• Take them to lunch
• Candies
• Assorted Gift Baskets
• Starbucks gift cards
• Indulge Pure Originals moisturizing lotion, creams, body butter bar
• Facial, manicure,
• Rose Petal Pedicure this month only $35  here

I want to thank all of my administrative front desk coordinators for all of their hardwork, loyalty and for putting up with my crazy ideas and for making Indulge Salon look good. Alex, my daughter for helping me from behind the scenes, Alex T for making sure our new customers get their information being liason to staff and customers, Melissa for social media management and the other stuff you do behind the scenes, Carol for being an awesome trainer, fill in when someone gets sick, changing light bulbs and correcting my grammar when it doesn’t make sense, Becca for being “all that and more” front desk, colorist, fill in where needed,  Amanda for being that management glue and liason, Sarah for putting up with all our training to be manager, and Paris for being a liason to our clients and positive outlook on life. You guys rock!