Administrative Assistant's Update - sample

JULY 2017 P R O F E S S I O N A L D E V E L O P M E N T F O R C A N A D A ' S O F F I C E S U P P O R T S T A F F Administrative Assistant's UPDATE UPDATE PM #40065782 INSIDE Entropic me? � � � � � � � � � � � � � 2 Deepak Chopra worries about wearing down our inner person LinkedIn tips � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Which account level is right for you or your boss? Navigating Excel � � � � � � � � � � 6 Increase your efficiency and save time Joy of mentoring � � � � � � � � � � 7 Helping junior admins create resume packages By Jennifer Lewington AAU Associate Editor When Kelly Taylor attended her first Ontario Hospital Association confer- ence for adminis- trative assistants in 2006, she was impressed by how much information and learning she acquired over the two-day session. "I thought this is awesome'," says Taylor, an administrative assistant at St. Joseph's Health Care in London, Ontario. When the event wrapped up, organizers asked for volunteers for the next year's event and Taylor signed up. Every year since, she has been a member (and sometimes chair) of the annual conference's organizing committee that works with OHA, the event sponsor. Over the past decade, Taylor and her colleagues have honed best practices for a successful meet - ing, which begins with a commit- ment to put delegates first. "For me, you have to understand your audience and who is coming," says Taylor, an assistant to a director and a site manager in the medical imaging program at St. Joe's. For the OHA's April 2017 conference that drew about 125 delegates from across the province, she served as commit- tee chair. "Hospital health care work- ers are our audience and stakeholders and that is who we are developing our conference for," she says. With stiff competition for health care training dollars, Taylor says she and her committee colleagues aim to make it as easy as possible for ad- mins to request time off to attend the OHA conference. To that end, Taylor's committee and OHA staff members look to control costs so the registra- tion fee is affordable for delegates. "You definitely need a good return on investment," she says, citing one of her guiding principles for a suc- cessful event. That means recruiting speakers who are knowledgeable about the hard – and soft – skills essential for admin professionals to flourish in a fast-changing, increas- ingly digital-focused health care sector. At this year's conference, for example, speaker topics included best practices for productivity, how to deal with organizational change and resolve conflict with confidence. For some sessions, speakers pre- sented tips on how to relieve stress with humour and shared mindful- ness practices. Between sessions, delegates were given time to network with each other. The lean meeting During his years as creative advisor at Toyota, Matthew May noted how meetings at the company were run. He marveled at their efficiency – which he attributed, in large part, to the company's "lean" mentality. "A lean practitioner looks at the world of work as being one of two things: value-adding, or non value-adding. The ultimate goal of becoming lean is to add value by eliminating everything that doesn't," he observed. "Think of meetings as you would any other process: To be considered lean, a meeting must be characterized by minimal, and preferably absent, non value-add - ing work." – Forbes.com Meeting planning tips Success starts with putting audience first Continued on page 4 Kelly Taylor '

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