How to improve your Office Supervision?

Top management sets the objectives, middle management tries to achieve them and supervisory management actively helps the middle management in achieving the objectives set by top management. Supervisory management is represented by supervisors and departmental chiefs.

The supervisors not only get things done but they get the things done willingly and harmoniously through employees. Supervision can be defined as the process in which an individual directs and control the work of others.

According to Neuner and Keeling, “Supervision includes the planning of work. Supervision also involves securing actual performance that approximates, as closely as possible, desired performance.

Planning includes setting up the best methods to produce an acceptable quality of office work in a standard quantity so that production may be measured in terms of these criteria. Maintaining such standards, with due considerations of the human relationships existing in office work and supervision, should make it possible to reduce the cost of production.”

Planning, organizing and staffing can be considered preparatory managerial functions; the purpose of controlling is to find out whether or not the objectives are being achieved. The connecting and actuating link between these functions are managerial function of supervision which means the issuance of directives and the guidance and over-seeing of the subordinates.

Thus supervision, in the context of office management, relates to provision of leadership, direction, guidance and motivation of office workers to better performance of office operations according to the plan and objectives.

Supervision in the office is the task of the supervisor. Little field and Peterson describe “a supervisor as a person who carries out lower level responsibilities for, higher level management and has a direct control over personnel’s.”

Terry describes a supervisory as a “Management member working at an organizational level where personal over-sight of tasks assigned to small groups is assumed in order to assure satisfactory performance.”