This pattern is concerned with the nature of the role and the activities carried out by the 'receptionist' or reception in different organisations. A receptionist can serve as a coordination point between the internal operations of a company and the external world of customers, clients and so forth. When this operates successfully the receptionist will be able to filter and channel information from outside sources to the suitable person within the company and vice versa. They will serve as the first place to call for information on company personnel, business and so forth. This role clearly requires a degree of expertise and knowledge about the workings and activities of the company, customers and so forth. It is questionable whether a single person can fulfill this role in a company unless it is fairly small.
When a receptionist or reception serves as a hub they can serve as a crucial central coordination point for the organisation and their contacts with outside clients, customers and so forth. For example their placement near an and their role in organising, for example, room allocation, travel and so on helps in entrance can facilitate keeping track of people, knowing who is doing what, when. This adds to their ability to screen (check for appropriateness and so on) and filter (direct to the right person) inquiries to the organisation though various media (face-to-face, telephone, e-mail) where appropriate.
This pattern has been described in two settings so far. The focus is on the detailing the how the front office reception operates to serve the back office staff in an organisation. In the consultancy example the receptionist is said to successfully operate as a hub in the council planning office the situation is more ambiguous for a number of reasons.
This pattern is illustrated with vignettes from the following field work:
* ConsultancyFirmFirstExample. How the receptionist in a small consultancy firm acts as a hub - coordinating between workers within the and workers and clients outwith the site.
* CouncilPlanningDepartmentSecondExample. An example of a distributed reception hub within a larger council office. Focusing on the less effective coordination due to organisation size and complexity of business.
The two vignettes which provide the pattern receptionist as a hub suggest a number of design implications and the council planning example is useful when seen in the light of the vignette in 'Working With Interruptions'(WorkWithInterruptions). In the consultancy example the role of receptionist is seen to work well as a point of coordination. This is likely to do with such factors as the size of the organisation, as well as the location of the reception desk, and the central role of the receptionist in organising committee rooms etc. On-going knowledge of the business is crucial, too, to the screening and filtering of inquiries. In the council example the size of the organisation and the diversity of functions carried out by different departments means that the general council receptionist, who works as the initial contact point for all telephone inquiries cannot serve as a hub in the same way. Their necessarily poorer on-going knowledge of the business does not allow them to screen and filter calls in the same way and the job of keeping up with what is going on is far more complex. When clients inquire face-to-face for planning department they can be passed on to the planning receptionists who must then serve as a coordination point, while emails are forwarded directly to the back office. When we combine the 'receptionist as a hub' and 'working with interruptions' vignettes as a study resource for the planning department we can see that in order better to coordinate through a central point work redesign needs to be undertaken. Possibilities include employing a single, dedicated receptionist to deal as the first contact point for all (face-to-face, telephone and email) inquiries or various socio-technical solutions. For a fuller explication see Martin et al. 2002) Therefore, issues concern the scalability of this pattern, how complexity of business is dealt with and how inquiries and communications across different media are handled are important when considering this pattern.