I’ve never had an office job and I’ve always wondered what it is a typical cubicle worker actually does in their day-to-day. When your boss assigns you a “project”, what kind of stuff might it entail? Is it usually putting together some kind of report or presentation? I hear it’s a lot of responding to emails and attending meetings, but emails and meetings about what, finances?
I know it’ll probably be largely dependent on what department you work in and that there are specific office jobs like data-entry where you’re inputting information into a computer system all day long, HR handles internal affairs, and managers are supposed to delegate tasks and ensure they’re being completed on time. But if your job is basically what we see in Office Space, what does that actually look like hour-by-hour?
I work for a consulting firm, so a project is whatever our client has contracted us to do, for the objectives and timeline we’ve agreed to in the contract. We do workforce readiness, largely. So the client might be adopting a new software and wants us to create the employee training on it.
We contract with them for training to help their leaders deliver workshops, maybe some e-learning modules and assessments, and to have it done in a certain number of weeks. That’s an example of a project, and typically we’ll have a small team on the deliverables for it: the modules and the workshops. Meetings are to check in on progress, fix any issues, meet with the client or their subject matter experts. So that’s my office job, though luckily it’s been remote for me since covid.