The Ins and Outs of working in an office

Hi everyone! My second blog post comments on how different it is working in an office compared to working in a casual customer service job.

This internship was my first experience working in an office.

I have spent the last 7 years working as a casual employee in the hospitality industry. I have worked at a number of cafes, restaurants and bars to fund my way through school and university. Whilst I have gained a lot of skills in customer service, function management and can definitely say I am very good at remembering people’s orders, I was introduced to a very different type of work when I began my internship.

I currently work part time at my local pub as a casual employee, usually doing about 20 hours per work. Whilst I am at work I am constantly being supervised and kept to a very strict timeframe; I must start at this time and cannot leave until this time.

When I came to the internship, I was very surprised at the amount of freedom you have. Before starting I assumed I would be under strict time constraints to have my work completed by, and envisioned being constantly schooled and checked up on by the boss. But I wasn’t. It was as if they just trusted me to get the work done…

For example, you are pretty much free to begin and end your day as you please. Some employees choose to start at 7.30am and leave by 4.30pm, others may start at 9.00am. At the end of my first day I was very unsure of what the protocol was to leave. At 4.45pm I looked around and noticed majority of the staff were no longer in the office. I went to find my supervisor to ask when I should leave as I had finished my work for the day, but was told she’d already left. Apparently I was fine to just leave when I wanted. I was very surprised at this level of freedom. I was able to go on lunch when I wanted to, and I was able to leave to get coffee whenever I wanted to- a major plus for me.

One important note I learnt after my first day was do not wear heels! I got a bad case of blisters and struggled to walk around for the rest of the week.   

Overall, I have really enjoyed working in an office and the perks you get with it. It is very different to customer service and hospitality, but I am done with that chapter of my life and very much ready to start my new chapter in the corporate world!

The office has a very open floor plan, which allows for easy interaction between the different departments.