Introductory text

Offices are universal. Offices are found in every type of organization. As you know, banks, department stores, manufacturing companies, supermarkets, medical clinics, schools, agencies, and other organizations have offices. Organizations require many different types of talented, competent workers, including large numbers of office workers. Office employees are a significant portion of the country’s total workforce.

Offices are places of work for millions of people. Of course, many workers who consider the office their place of work are not actually office workers. From time to time some of them may perform tasks that are performed by office workers. However, their major responsibilities do not relate to office tasks. For example, attorneys may make telephone calls and may answer the telephone, which are tasks office workers perform. Attorneys are not office workers, though.

In offices the personnel spend full time on tasks classified as office tasks or functions. You know that technological developments influence the way offices are organized and the way office work is performed. All offices are not alike. Even the offices of a particular organization will vary in size, structure, and nature of activity. Some offices are specialized, which means that their employees carry out a particular activity only. Other offices, where employees perform many tasks, are called general offices.

There are different functions within offices. Therefore, as you might guess, there are also different functions performed by office employees. An appealing feature of becoming an office worker is this variety in positions. For example, if there certain tasks that you prefer, you may be able to choose a job where most of your time is spend on just those tasks. On the other hand, if you are interested in variation, you may find a job with a wide range of tasks.

Generally, workers of clerical grades perform three types of office functions. They deal with visitors, do paperwork, and operate office equipment.

To deal with visitors and customers professionally office employees must know how to greet and register people, accommodate them, answer the telephone, receive and leave messages, make telephone calls on the instructions of executives, arrange meetings, make bookings and appointments.

Clerical or paper work also takes much time and demands proficiency. Office employees need skills and knowledge to sort out the mail and deal with correspondence, draft letters and memos, respond to inquiries, accept and place orders, keep records and file documents in the filing cabinet, use references and take shorthand, if necessary.

The modern office environment requires employees who are able to operate the computer that is to input data at a computer terminal and process information, keyboard documents and photocopy the necessary materials, fax or e-mail letters and documents.

If office workers want to handle things well and perform at a high level so that they feel comfortable at work, they should take their duties seriously trying to be competent and to constantly improve the performance.

Task II. Provide the title for the text above. Use the suggested titles in the box:

Title 1.	THE MODERN OFFICE ENVIRONMENT
Title 2.	OFFICE ROUTINE
Title 3.	CLERICAL GRADES WORKERS’ FUNCTIONS
Title 4.	TYPES OF OFFICES

Task III. Read the following text to decide if it has something in common with the Introductory Text.

TEXT 2

SPECIALIZATION IN THE OFFICE WORKFORCE

Every office worker participates in some aspects of information processing. There are key types of office positions. They are called office position clusters². The four clusters are:

• word/text processing;

• data processing;

• information management and distribution/transmission;

• general assistance and customer service.

You must remember, however, that the combination of tasks for a particular position may include tasks from several of the four clusters.

I. Word/text processing is the term used to describe the system for preparing documents (such as letters, memorandums, and reports) that are composed primarily of words. Present-day positions, which are mainly word/text processing jobs, include word/text processing specialists, typists, and secretaries.