To mark National Work Life Week, we’re sharing ‘Week in the Life of’ stories from our colleagues. Grab a cuppa and have read of what a week is like for Rachel O’brien, whose a Technical Services Administrator and a Climate Champion.
Monday
If I’m lucky, Mondays are always the busiest day of the week for me! My workday started at 8:30 am when I logged on and said good morning to my team members. I then checked my emails and organised my to do list. I had a quick look at our reporting system to filter through out of hours work from the weekend that needed processing – I planned to make a start on these after my 9:30 am meeting. I always cross my fingers and hope that it’ll be under 70, but you never know.
Before I knew it, it was 9:30 am and time for our team meeting, where we caught up on things we needed to do for the week and tried to remember what we did at the weekend!
After the team meeting, I pulled together the out of hours rota for the week ahead, making sure I had captured any last-minute changes before sharing it with our out of hours service. Once this was sent off, it was finally time to crack on with processing the reports from the weekend and making sure trades had been paid for the call outs they did.
I stopped for lunch at 12ish, and it was a nice day, so I spent some time in the garden soaking in some rays with my two mini-Schnauzers!
After lunch, I processed the remaining reports and checked for any call outs that were sent to our contractors and raised purchase orders for them too.
I finished the day by catching up on emails and chased any jobs that we hadn’t received reports for yet – hoping they’d land in my inbox for Tuesday morning.
Tuesday
I had less out of hours reports to process on this day, I used the morning to work through some of the reports from the previous night so I could get on with other tasks in the afternoon.
10 am and it was time for a team meeting - a good catch up with my team to find out what’s going on in the business. After this I processed the trades standby payments for the week before.
Later that afternoon, our sales ledger team returned the recharge invoice batch that I had previously sent to them. I added the batch to our job history and took a trip down to the post-box to make sure invoice copies were sent to the relevant customers.
Wednesday
On Wednesday, I had a more exciting day ahead. I was due to deliver one out of two Carbon Literacy Training sessions to a group of colleagues that afternoon with my fellow Climate Champion – shout out to Olivia Addy.
I used the morning to do the usual (process reports and raise purchase orders), and then dedicated some time to read through our Powerpoint presentation for the session to remind myself of the recent changes and to prepare for a 1pm kick-off. Yes, the prep also included eating a good lunch and doing lots of deep breathing to calm my nerves!
Thankfully, we had a few comfort breaks mid-session, but at around 4:15 pm my dogs started to grumble at me for their dinner…not long left now.
At 5 pm, the first part of the virtual training sessions had successfully been delivered, so I logged off to have a well-deserved glass of water and then fed the dogs. I always tend to get presentation anxiety, but there really was no need for me to be so nervous as our group were so lovely – and the deep breathing exercises definitely helped. The second part of our training course would be delivered the following week and then hopefully we’d have a brand-new bunch of accredited carbon literate colleagues.
Thursday
Thursday started with catching up on emails from the previous day. I also checked and processed the out of hours reports from the previous night.
At 10 am we had a team meeting to discuss our work schedules. You see, I recently joined a new team, so there’s plenty of training to be done!
After this meeting, I checked the out of hours rota for the following week and forwarded it to the managers, supervisors, and colleagues in trades to make sure everyone was on the same page. Sharing the rota with everyone is useful to get ahead of any potential gaps before Monday. That afternoon, I ran the recharge report and sent it off to our sales ledger team (my recharge buddy, Carley) to raise requested invoices.
Friday
TGI Friday! First thing is first, 9 am meeting with the supervisors to take a two-week look ahead at the out of hours rota to fill in any gaps.
After this, I checked my emails and actioned anything urgent. I attended our 9:30 am team meeting (I know meetings, meetings, meetings) and ran through anything that I needed support with, as I was on annual leave the following week! I then met with my manager to provide a handover and ticked off my to-do list to make sure all bases were covered.
Just before 5 pm, I set my ‘out of office’ on, logged off and packed away my entire desk as on the Monday I would be moving house! But before all of that, it was time for a big Friday night dinner and an early night ahead of some heavy lifting over the weekend. Bit of a strange feeling as the next time I’d log on to work, I’d be settling in my new home (probably very tired from the move too).
