1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background Of The Study
To improve efficiency in Industry, management is usually working for ways to increase productivity, quality of goods and services and grab the best edge among her other competitors. These aim can easily be achieved through the use of high technology in the office.
The over all operation of a secretary's naturally involve a tremendous amount of paper shuffing and record keeping, accounting procedures for payrolls, financial reports, invoices etc. in all integral parts of the Nigerian industries.
Office methods and services are daily getting complex and the volume of materials and information to be handled are daily increasing and the reaction or response and time expected of the secretary is now shorter than it has been in the recent past. There is therefore the need for office administrator which include the secretary, to cope with the increasing quantity and quality of services required as a result modern equipment are rapidly spreading of Nigeria industries.
Prior to the present information revolution called information age, most of the jobs performed by secretary's in office are manually carried out. Consequent upon this, most outputs and services were of very how standard.
Moreover, a great deal of time, money, energy and materials were lost in the course of producing one unit of an output. According to Stonick (1989) the workload was enormous and the staffing for the sake of economy, was as small as possible. The clerk a sort of combination photocopier, secretary and accountant, had too much to do, and time of the work was laborious, dull and time consuming.
During the 19th century industrial revolution of Europe and that of America, many equipments were produced which possess the ability to perform most of the functions previously performed by man not only were the machines found to be capable of performing similar functions previously performed by man, they were found to be able to our-perform man quantitatively and qualitatively. Following this discovering the years a lot of improvement and innovation have been introduced to enhance and facilitate the secretary's job. Various machines have been developed and introduced into the offices.
Notable among them are:
- Computer
- Telephone
- Facsimile machines
- Tele printers
- Telex machines
- Thought tank machines
- Tape call-maker
- Intercom (PABX) facilities
- Internet network.
During the industrial revolution, the secretary achieved a ‘cog' status, in that he had to work with these machines and was in real sense, part of the machines. But with communication equipment the secretary has been able to liberate himself from the status. His duties are now defined:
- To control the mechanism
- To feed information and instructions into machines, through cards, tapes and to stand by for mechanical break that might probably not come.
Office communications could only take place by the use of some of the modern office machines as communications is the process of creating, transmitting and interpreting ideas, facts, opinions and feelings. These new innovation brought a lot of changes to the secretary's work in terms of memos, reports and the skill of communication, for instance giving instructions, interviewing e.t.c.
1.2 Statement Of Problem
The problem of this study is to gain information about the effects of the latest communication on secretary's profession. In offices, secretaries are employed to perform secretarial function exclusively.
In most case, these secretaries are deficient in the operations of these communication equipments. Thus it is caused by lack of adequate training on how to operate the machines. Moreover cost of purchasing the machines are exorbitantly high and cost of training is also high. This poses a great problem to the existing offices in the establishment and this research work will n its preceding chapters expatiate comprehensively on the problem.
The latest communication office equipment are very indispensable and especially now that almost every office had gone technologically. The industries wishing to stand to survive the test of time are embracing every facts of the necessary automation.
The basic motivation for communication office equipment arose out of the following desires
- To increase productivity of labour
- To improve quality of service
- The need for decency: The communication office equipments makes the office environment decent.
- And competition, which is one of the Chief, pressing reason for automation.
In spite of the good things about these machines. It is observed that many offices have not installed the machines for their secretaries. What must have been the caused for his neglect? Would it be that they are not aware of the advantages of those machine that they lack the technical know how or that they do not deem the knowledge of the existence of the machines necessary. This study therefore tends to explore the possibilities of exposing to office under study to the benefits of the latest communication office equipment on secretary profession and investigate the needs and implications of office automation in establishments.
1.3 Purpose Of The Study
For each work done, there must be a purpose or rather an objectives to justify the work. The purpose of this study are:
- To identify the latest communication office equipment that are of vital importance in the office and to the secretary particular.
- To consider the effect of the latest communication office equipment in a secretary's profession.
- To evaluate the level of awareness of Nigeria secretaries on the existence and use of these facilities.
- To highlight the important and uses of the latest communication office equipment and how they increases productivity. This is with the view to making the management see the need of acquiring those that are not available in the establishment.
1.4 Significance Of The Study
This piece of work is significant because it exposes the needs of the latest communication office equipment and create better awareness of the implication of automating office function.
The findings will among other things help:
- To dispose of the superstitution belief that the latest communication office equipment are the greatest enemy of men as it displaces man from the job, deny him of initiative in his job, and makes him a more machines operators and destroy old division of labour.
- In determine the disadvantages of the non-availability of these equipments on secretary's profession.
- Potential secretaries to set up efforts to undertake some training on the operation of communication office equipment.
- The establishment in applying various methods of operation.
- In condition to academics in polytechnics and universities.
1.5 Scope Of The Study
This study covered the operations of secretaries in Nigeria Breweries Enugu branch, comprises of six department which are personnel management, accounts/finance department, data processing department, maintenance department, sales/marketing department and payroll department.
1.6 Research Questions
- Do the latest communication office equipment embark the integration of computer and sophisticated office equipment to support the activities of the work place.
- How does it help in facilitating the job performance of secretary in your establishment.
- Do secretaries derive job satisfaction from the use of these equipment.
- Do you have the latest communication office equipment in your establishment.
- Were the secretaries during orientation course and training exposed to these equipment.
- Are these equipment display secretary's efforts thereby resulting to loss of the secretarial personnel inn the establishment.
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