HR Frontiers with Senyo M Adjabeng: Performance management for administrative and support roles

In modern business, the spotlight most often falls on the revenue generators, the sales teams closing monumental deals, the visionary product developers, the charismatic C-suite leaders.

Their performance metrics are clear, their goals quantifiable, their impact directly traceable to the bottom line.  Yet, operating in the wings, ensuring the show goes on without a hitch, are the administrative and support professionals—executive assistants, office managers, IT support staff, administrative coordinators, and facilities personnel.

Their performance management, however, is frequently an afterthought, shoehorned into frameworks designed for entirely different functions.  This is a critical strategic error.  To build a resilient, agile, and efficient organization, we must fundamentally reimagine how we measure, develop, and value the performance of these vital roles.  Effective performance management for administrative and support staff is not an HR compliance task, it is the deliberate tuning of the engine that powers the entire enterprise.

The traditional model of performance management, with its annual reviews and generic competencies, fails these roles spectacularly.  Where a salesperson has quarterly targets, how does one quantify the value of an executive assistant who deftly shields a leader from chaos, granting them the cognitive space for strategic thought?

Can a simple checklist capture the crisis-averting ingenuity of an office manager who orchestrates a seamless transition during a sudden office relocation or a global IT support technician who patiently resolves a critical issue for a frustrated, non-technical colleague?  The endemic challenge here is the perceived “invisibility” of peak performance.

Now when these professionals excel, operations are smooth, systems function, and leaders are empowered;.  Their success is often felt only in its absence.  Consequently, their evaluations frequently default to subjective perceptions of “attitude” or a forensic accounting of minor errors, fostering demotivation and a transactional mindset.

Therefore, the first pillar of a reinvented framework is the shift from task-counting to impact-measuring.  This requires managers to think deeply about the downstream effects of administrative work.  Instead of “processed 100 invoices,” a more meaningful objective could be “Ensure 99.5% accuracy in invoice processing and maintain vendor payment terms to preserve early-payment discounts and optimize organizational cash flow.”

This ties the task directly to financial health.  For an executive assistant, a goal might be “Proactively manage the executive’s calendar to ensure a minimum of 30% of their time is protected for deep-focus strategic work, as reflected in monthly time audits.”  This moves beyond scheduling to enabling leadership effectiveness.

Competencies for ‘Soft’ Roles

The core question must be, how does this role, when performed exceptionally, make others more effective and the organization more resilient?  This leads to the second pillar – valuing and measuring soft power and organizational stewardship. Administrative and support roles are the neural network of corporate culture and operational health.  Their performance metrics must account for this.  Key competencies here include Anticipatory Capacity which is the ability to foresee needs and solve problems before they escalate.  This can be observed and documented through specific anecdotes in feedback sessions.

The second is Cross-functional Influence. This is the ability to navigate different departments, persuade without authority, and gather information.  Success can be reflected in 360-degree feedback from a wide range of internal “clients.”

Next is Crisis Mitigation and Calm.  Performance here is assessed not by the absence of crises, but by the effectiveness and poise demonstrated when they inevitably occur.  Post-incident reviews should highlight these contributions.  Finally is Knowledge Gateway Management.  Many support staff are the keepers of institutional memory and procedural knowledge.  Their performance can be linked to initiatives to document and share this knowledge, reducing organizational risk.

Performance Feedback

Third pillar is Feedback which must be frequent, multi-sourced, and contextual.  The annual review cycle is useless for roles where priorities can shift daily based on organizational needs.  Regular check-ins, weekly or bi-weekly, are crucial.  Furthermore, because these roles serve a broad clientele, incorporating structured 360-degree feedback is essential.  An IT support analyst’s performance review should include anonymized satisfaction scores from the employees they’ve assisted, alongside feedback from their manager and peers.

An office manager’s evaluation should incorporate input from department heads on the efficiency of shared services.  This rounded view combats the “my manager is my only customer” trap and provides rich, actionable data.  However, measurement is only half the equation.

The fourth pillar is developmental investment tailored to unique career pathways. There is a gradual but harmful myth that administrative roles are static.  Progressive organizations reject this.  Career lattices, not just ladders, should be visualized.

Performance discussions must explore horizontal moves into specialized areas like project management, event coordination, or HR, as well as vertical advancement into supervisory or chief-of-staff roles.

Development plans might include mentorship opportunities, certifications in project management (like PMP), software training, or budgeting courses.  As management thinker Peter Drucker noted, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”  For support staff, development is often the unspoken need and addressing it directly is a powerful retention tool.

Technology, the fifth pillar, should be an enabler, not a surveillance tool.  Modern performance management platforms can facilitate continuous feedback, goal tracking, and peer recognition.  However, for administrative staff, technology should also be leveraged to automate the very tasks that are easy to count (e.g., data entry), thereby freeing them to focus on the high-impact, human-centric aspects of their jobs that truly warrant evaluation. The goal of technology should be to elevate the role.

When a company views its support staff as a cost center to be minimized, it gets minimal performance.  When it views them as a force multiplier for its entire talent base, it invests accordingly and reaps exponential rewards in efficiency, morale, and stability.  But why is it so difficult to measure the performance of employees in administrative and support (Soft) roles?

The Clash of Line Vrs Soft Roles

The inherent challenge of measuring performance in administrative and support roles, often mischaracterized as “soft” roles, stems from a fundamental clash between the nature of the work and the traditional architecture of corporate evaluation.

The difficulty is not a reflection of the roles’ lesser importance, but rather a testament to their complex, relational, and contextual character.  This measurement quandary arises from several interwoven factors that expose the limitations of conventional managerial frameworks.

Foremost, the output-to-outcome gap is particularly vast and foggy for these positions.  An administrative assistant produces a flawless briefing packet, an IT support specialist resolves a ticket, a facilities coordinator ensures the coffee supplies are stocked.

These are the visible, countable outputs.  Yet their true performance lies in the outcomes those outputs create, which are diffuse, delayed, and often attributed to others.  The briefing packet enables a CEO to make a swift, informed decision in a high-stakes meeting.

The resolved ticket prevents three hours of lost productivity for a designer on a critical deadline.  The stocked coffee, a seemingly trivial detail, contributes to an atmosphere of care that keeps employees engaged during a long brainstorming session.  The administrative employee’s performance is embedded in the productivity, morale, and effectiveness of others, creating a profound attribution problem.

Their excellence becomes a silent, embedded factor in someone else’s success story, making direct causal lines nearly impossible to draw with spreadsheets.

Secondly, the core currency of these roles is often risk mitigation and chaos absorption, phenomena notoriously resistant to positive measurement.  How does one quantify the crisis that did not happen because of a coordinator’s meticulous planning?  How is value assigned to the emotional steadiness of an executive assistant who buffers a leader from a barrage of minor interruptions, thereby preserving their strategic focus? Performance metrics naturally gravitate toward active achievements, goals met, projects completed.

Yet for many support roles, their highest value is in the problems they quietly circumvent, the inefficiencies they silently erase, and the stability they maintain.  This creates a perverse incentive structure where visible fire-fighting is often rewarded more than consistent, unseen fire-prevention.  Measuring the absence of failure is a conceptual and practical hurdle that most performance systems are ill-equipped to clear.

Thirdly, the work is inherently relational and service-oriented, its quality judged subjectively through countless micro-interactions.  Unlike the objective finality of a sales number, the performance of an office manager is experienced as a feeling, a sense of reliability, responsiveness, and trust among their colleagues. This qualitative nature defies easy standardization.  One employee may value rapid response above all else, while another prioritizes thoroughness and detailed explanation.

The support professional must constantly navigate these shifting, subjective expectations, and their performance is an aggregate of these interpersonal perceptions.  This moves evaluation firmly into the realm of 360-degree feedback and nuanced observation, which is more time-consuming and complex to administer than reviewing quarterly quota attainment.

Fourth, the scope of work is often reactive and fluid, dictated by the evolving needs of the organization and the people they support.  A rigid set of annual goals can become irrelevant by the second quarter, overtaken by a merger, a sudden departure, or a shift in strategic priorities.  The true skill of a masterful support professional is agile prioritizations and adaptive problem-solving in the face of this volatility.

Measuring someone against a fixed objective they were rightly forced to abandon in service of a more pressing organizational need is not only unfair but also fundamentally misaligned with the dynamic reality of their contribution.  Their performance is better assessed on their judgment, adaptability, and composure within the whirlwind, qualities again more observed than quantified.

Finally, there exists a deep-seated socio-cultural undervaluation that frames this work as “overhead” rather than “value-creating.  We struggle to measure their strategic impact because we have not bothered to look for it, designing systems that count tasks instead of analyzing influence.  This institutional blind spot ensures that the tools for measurement are blunt instruments, incapable of capturing the subtle artistry of high-caliber administrative and support work.

Therefore, the difficulty is not merely a technical or methodological issue; it is a systemic and cultural one.  To measure it effectively requires a radical shift in perspective from counting what is easily seen to interpreting what is deeply felt, from evaluating isolated outputs to assessing the health of the ecosystems they sustain.

It demands that we value stewardship as highly as we do conquest, and that we design performance conversations that are dialogues about impact and enablement, rather than audits of completed tasks.  Until this shift occurs, we will continue to misunderstand, and thus undervalue, the very glue that holds our complex organizations together.

In practice, pioneering organizations are already implementing these principles. Google’s famed “Project Aristotle,” which studied effective teams, found that psychological safety, a climate where individuals feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable, was the number one factor for success.

Administrative and support staff are often key to fostering this environment through their interactions, yet their role in doing so is rarely measured.  Similarly, the “Balanced Scorecard” approach advocated by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, which looks beyond financials to customer, internal process, and learning/growth perspectives, provides a perfect lens.  Support roles are pivotal in the “internal process” perspective, and their contribution to “learning and growth” through knowledge sharing is immense.  Their performance management should be a direct reflection of these strategic perspectives.

In an era defined by volatility, the true test of an organization is not just the height of its peaks but the solidity of its foundation.  Administrative and support professionals are that foundation.  They are the stewards of culture, the lubricant of processes, and the first line of defence against operational weaknesses.

To manage their performance with the same rigour, nuance, and strategic intent applied to frontline revenue roles is to acknowledge a simple truth, the engine deserves as much careful attention as the gleaming exterior of the vehicle.  The unsung engine, when properly tuned, empowers the entire machine to achieve feats far beyond the sum of its parts.

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