Setting up Administrative Systems

Introduction

Administrative systems refer to systems and processes for filing and record keeping, office correspondence, visitor and phone call management, internal communication, financial management and other administrative duties. Those systems should be understood and followed by all staff members to ensure a smooth functioning of your organisation.

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Why

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This toolkit is useful for your organisation when you:

• need to set up a basic administrative system.
• want to improve the existing administrative system, to be more efficient and use people's time effectively

What you can expect

In six steps, this toolkit guides you in implementing or improving one or more administrative systems in your organisation. Here you’ll find a step-by-step guide, tools, examples and other resources for setting up administrative systems.

Step 1: Planning meeting with the team

• Discuss the need of having efficient administrative systems, with the leaders and key staff.
• Identify who in the organisation will help with setting up basic administrative systems or assess and improve current systems.
• Identify who will be responsible for keeping the system running. Work closely with that person to develop systems.
• Agree that a training will be conducted once the new administrative systems are in place.

Please watch this video to understand the function of administration in an NGO:

Step 2: Assessment and Gap Analysis

• Use this Checklist Administrative Systems to assess the current organisation administrative practices.
• Work closely with the staff to understand the current practices and identify areas of improvement and gaps.
• Decide on which processes will need to be developed and set up.

Step 3: Development of Systems

• Discuss with the leader and staff what processes should be followed in each organisational area system (for example visitors management, external/internal office communications, filing and record keeping and financial management). In order to assess them in more depth, you can use the toolkit Central Filing System or Internal Office Communication on this Change the Game Academy website. 
• Create templates to standardise certain processes (e.g. phone code, sample e-mail answers etc.) if possible.

Step 4: Documentation

• Document all processes in a short manual, to facilitate the use of the system. The manual should be easy to understand for current staff members as well as for new joiners.

Step 5: Training

• Train the staff on how to run the system.
• Introduce the manual as a guideline for everyone involved in administrative processes.
• Assign clear roles and responsibilities to the different involved people. 

Step 6: Follow-up

• Support the organisation's staff in the implementation of the new administrative systems. Executing a new system will require approximately a three months critical period during which it takes a great effort from the organisation to learn and stick to the new ways of doing things.
• Follow up regularly and motivate the staff to ensure that they will not drop the new system and go back to old practices.

Key To Success

• Accurate documenting of the administrative processes is important to ensure that the processes are being followed by everyone. Those documents are a great induction tool for new joiners.
• The process of setting up or reviewing the administrative systems should be done with the involvement of relevant staff members to ensure that it is relevant and useful for them.
• Everything should be kept as simple as possible, as there might not be full-time staff to handle the systems. More sophisticated administrative systems can be set up at a later stage.

Challenges

• No full-time administrative staff might be available.
• Leaders and other staff members should feel involved to complete the administrative work.