5 Best Practices To Effectively Use Your Executive Assistant

Using an executive assistant is an effective way to enhance productivity for busy executives. Delegating some tedious tasks allows spending time focusing on core activities. You have to understand the following best practices to gain sustained productivity when working with an executive assistant. This allows getting the value you are paying for. 

5 Best Practices To Effectively Use Your Executive Assistant

• Orientation into your world:

Industries have unspoken rules and shared knowledge unknown by those in other industries. Your assistant is less likely to have insight into these to accomplish nuanced projects with effectiveness. Before allowing them to handle such tasks, ensure to empower them the appropriate industry knowledge.

You can do this by giving them access to your inbox and calendar. Additionally, allow them to listen to some of your business meetings. Another idea is to recommend some books, industry publications, and podcasts that can give them a better understanding of your industry. Sharing this knowledge with your executive assistant makes them become part of your industry for effective management of your projects. 

• Share your preferences:

For a smooth and meaningful working relationship with your virtual executive assistant, sharing your preferences is essential. This allows the assistant to complete your tasks much quicker than you could by yourself. When hiring the executive assistant be upfront regarding all your preferences including your preferred restaurants for meetings and fonts for your emails. The executive assistant is likely to document your preferences for future reference. This limits the chances of misunderstandings in the future. 

• Offer constructive feedback:

You have to spare time to give the executive assistant feedback regarding their performance. This limits  the chances of making mistakes, taking longer to accomplish projects, and doing things that don’t meet your expectations. These errors are likely to rise and erode the value of hiring an executive assistant if you don’t talk about them. 

When giving feedback, avoid being angry. The assistant works every day to contribute to your success and you have to help them not feel ashamed for mistakes. Offer particular details about what went wrong and what the assistant should do to fix them. Be willing to respond to questions the assistant might have. And, let your expectations align with those of your assistant to limit further mistakes. 

• Delegate current tasks:

To get more value out of hiring an executive assistant, ensure to delegate on-going projects. This will give you a more productive experience. You get a chance to only hire the assistant after making sure that they can handle the task. This has high returns on investment while saving you a lot of time and effort. Delegating on-going tasks has a significant impact on productivity with a chance of saving yourself from time-consuming and distracting small tasks. 

Some of the basic tasks to delegate while on-going include:

• Managing travel

• Scheduling meetings

• Making lunch arrangements

• Filing expense reports

• Creating reports and agendas for meetings

• Communicate with context:

A good executive assistant learns proactively to anticipate your needs. However, don’t expect them to read your mind. Ensure to communicate with context to give the assistant the required information required to accomplish projects appropriately. This requires giving the assistant explicitly what you expect from their service. Create a system with context clues if you usually delegate tasks while rushing. Your executive assistant will have all the required information to accomplish the task without the need for additional instructions.  

Perhaps you can have the assistant listen to your meetings to anticipate the way forward with your projects. You can also use particular terminology to refer to contacts for the assistant to realize the way forward without waiting for more instructions. Working with an assistant efficiently requires creating some keywords or clues that quickly offer context for handling tasks successfully. 

• Why hire an executive assistant from an agency?

There is no need to get worried about not having enough time to train an assistant. Getting one from an agency allows getting someone to handle your tasks with appropriate experience and knowledge. The chances are high that the assistant has worked with someone with similar requirements to yours. And, the agency will handpick the best executive assistant to meet your requirements giving you time to focus on your core business tasks. 

When you work with a virtual assistant from an agency it limits chances of waking up to realize the assistant gone. Freelance assistants usually lack a commitment to clients. These are after going for customers who pay better. Your freelance assistant might leave you midway through the project to work for a better paying customer. However, assistants from an agency are always committed to serving current customers in the best way possible until completion of the project.  

Wrapping up:

To achieve work-life balance, you need to hire an executive assistance to handle those trivial tasks in your office. A handpicked assistant from an agency will handle your tasks diligently to meet your deadlines and expectations. This will give you time to focus on core business tasks or to go on vacation.