Office Manager (Maternity Cover)

Background

Vibrant, diverse, and robust civil societies are essential to achieving peace, human rights, and environmental justice. But most of the world lives in countries with threatened civic spaces and global freedom continues to decline year on year.

Courageous people and communities around the world are fighting to make rights and justice universally possible within this context. But they face attacks and reprisals from powerful vested interests. Many pay the ultimate price.

Open Briefing is a vital part of the response. We provide holistic security support and resources to empower people and communities to agitate and advocate without fear of attacks and reprisals. We also provide consultancy and retained support to help high- impact nonprofits and foundations understand and meet their risk management and duty of care commitments from the grassroots to the global.

Last year, we answered more calls for assistance across more countries than ever before. Our international teams of protection specialists, digital security consultants, and counsellors and psychologists provided nearly 6,000 hours of direct support to civil society organisations and activists under threat in 100 countries.

The scope and scale of the demand for both our pro-bono support and fee-paying services is rapidly and significantly expanding. Key members of our senior leadership team (SLT) require additional support as we grow our organisation to respond. This is where you come in!

Role Description

You will play a key role in the smooth running of our organisation and helping our leadership team succeed. As Office Manager, you will hold a central role within the organisation, supporting team members across all programmes. Working closely with the Senior Leadership Team, your role is diverse and often responsive to ever changing needs of the organisation.

As our finance administrator, you will support our finance director by taking responsibility for key bookkeeping and credit control tasks. Across your role, we hope that you will streamline and improve our existing processes and systems to remove friction points and reduce errors and oversights; we are open to change! Your primary responsibilities will include:

Office management

You will support the Senior Leadership Team by:

• Scheduling and preparing agendas for meetings.
• Preparing and issuing contracts to clients and consultants.
• Liaising with clients and consultants to resolve any contracting or invoicing issues.
• Updating our project management system.
• Undertaking ad hoc administration and research tasks.

You will support the programmes team by

• Working closely with our three programmes teams by providing system support to our team members and consultants.
• Manage relationships with third party providers.

Recruitment

• You will oversee recruitment, including the creation of job packs, advertising roles, screening applications, shortlisting candidates, coordinating interviews, vetting, and onboarding and managing all application communications.

Finance

You will support our Finance Director by:

• Preparing and issuing sales invoices and liaising with clients.
• Processing purchase invoices including all consultant invoices & expenses.
• Managing banking and pay runs.
• Providing ad hoc support for audits and grant reports.
• Assisting with bookkeeping in platforms such as Xero and Dext.
• Completing ad hoc purchasing requests including all office & IT equipment & sundry items and managing subscriptions for all team members.

HR

• First point of contact for all HR matters.
• Manage HR platforms for UK and International team members.
• Support new team members through onboarding.
• Coordinate all types of leave and ensure effective communication with relevant team members.
• Check monthly payroll and carry out a mid-month payment run to ensure timely payments.
• Support team with expenses and any HR or payroll queries.

Travel

• Work closely with our third party travel agency for team members and consultant travel booking.
• Compile budgets for upcoming travel plans for clients and team members.
• Assist in the creation and management of in person collaboration meetings.

Administration cover

You will provide PA cover to our CEO and our director of wellbeing and resilience by:

• Reviewing, prioritising, and responding to emails.
• Scheduling and calendar management.

Person specification

Essential

• You will have at least five years of professional experience as an office manager or personal assistant.
• You will have professional experience in roles that involve finance administration or bookkeeping tasks, such as processing invoices and pay runs.
• You will be computer literate and familiar with common email, calendar, project management, bookkeeping, and accounting tools.
• You will pay attention to detail and be highly organised.
• You will be able to multitask and prioritise.
• You will be a proactive and effective communicator with clients and colleagues.
• You will be based in the United Kingdom.
• You will be sensitive to the rights-based agendas and diverse profiles of our clients.
• You will have excellent written and spoken English.

Desirable

• You may have experience working in the nonprofit sector.
• You may have customer service experience.
• You may be familiar with ProtonMail, Google Calendar, Avaza, Dext, and/or Xero.

Terms and remuneration

This is a remote, home-working role. You will be contracted for 40 hours a week. Flexitime is available. It is a full time, fixed term 12 month contract with a one month notice period.

We are looking for someone who wants to cover this pivotal role within our close-knit team and develop a long-term working relationship with us. You will be properly onboarded and continually supported by experienced and compassionate managers and colleagues. Your line manager will be our finance director, Rosa Levin.

In return for your time and dedication, we will offer you a remuneration package made up of fair pay, sector-leading benefits, and progressive leave policies, including:

• Salary of £36,700 per annum.
• 7% employer pension contribution.
• Family private medical insurance.
• Employee Assistance Programme, including welfare counselling.
• Unlimited professional coaching.
• Enhanced annual leave of 25 days plus local public holidays.
• Additional leave days for annual closedown.
• Enhanced sick pay.
• Flexible working, including flexitime and remote and home working.
• Access to local coworking spaces.
• Support for climate action:
  • Personal carbon emissions offsetting.
  • Up to two additional leave days for sustainable travel.
  • Up to two additional leave days for climate activism.
• Apple MacBook and peripherals.

Please let us know in your cover letter if any of these dates are problematic and we will try to accommodate. The successful candidate will need to complete a reasonable vetting process before engagement.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Open Briefing values diversity. We are committed to equality of opportunity, to being fair and inclusive, and to being a place where all can be their authentic selves. We therefore encourage applications from all who meet the person specification and particularly from candidates who are from historically-marginalised communities and are underrepresented in our finance and administration team. This currently includes people of colour.

Please read our diversity, equity, and inclusion policy for more information. Our ethical and environmental policies are also available. And you may find our Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values statement of interest.

Open Briefing is a Disability Confident Employer and a signatory of the Charter for Employers Who Are Positive About Mental Health. We will make reasonable adjustments for disabled and neurodivergent people during the recruitment process and any subsequent employment. Please let us know in your cover letter how we can be the recruiter and employer you need us to be.

We have checked the text of this advert using the Gender Decoder tool.

Safeguarding

Open Briefing is dedicated to upholding the highest safeguarding standards, ensuring a culture of respect and protection for both our internal and external stakeholders. Our approach encompasses preventative measures and a strong response mechanism to any safeguarding concerns, guided by a survivor/victim-centred ethos. We enforce a strict no-tolerance policy towards any violations of safeguarding policies, ensuring that all concerns are addressed promptly and appropriately. Our safeguarding policy is available here.