It´s only 9.30 AM on Monday and you already feel overwhelmed?
Or maybe it´s one of those days when you didn't have time to stand up from your desk and have lunch? Yet, when you look back at your day, you can not pin exactly what you have spent your last 9 hours working on?
The beauty and terror of the role of the Assistant,- it´s never boring, yet most of the time you have to be everything for everyone. One of my colleagues used to joke when presenting newcomers to me on their onboarding day,- ¨this is Ruta, she knows everything about the company. So anything you need – she´s your person¨.
Now tell me,- what role on LinkedIn has a description of ¨person who can help you with everything¨ or ¨can answer any question¨ ? It sounds as if you were describing GOOGLE instead of a real person. Yet, that´s what most Assistants experience as their day to day thing. Feeling overwhelmed, burned out, stress and lack of time is more often the norm of the role than the exception. Yet when people ask ¨What you do?¨ and your response is ¨I am an Assistant¨ more often than not the reaction is something like ¨Oh, so it´s like a secretary? Answering emails, phone calls and making coffee?¨
After a few dozens of people reacting this way, most of the Assistants put their hands in the air with zero hope that anybody will ever understand what is that they do. And quite frankly unless you´ve been an Assistant yourself or have one,- you barely know what they do. Most Assistants stay behind the curtains and help to manage the performance of the company. The indicator of the job well done is the fact that everything is the Company is going smooth, Executive has received slides on time and meetings do not overlap.
The lack of understanding of the scope of the role, often coming even from the Assistants themselves is the main reason why the first exercise we do in training is zooming out of the role and the day-to-day, aiming for a visual, schematic overview of the role. More often than not Assistants do way more than Executive support with managing emails, meetings, phone calls, trips or expenses submission for their Exec. They end up helping HR with setting up interviews (because nobody else knows when their Exec is available), they help with Events, with office management, with Office Moves, with Employee training, with procurement.
Curiously enough, when you have 10 assistants working on this task I am about to lay down for you, everyone ends up seeing, that the name of the role ¨ASSISTANT¨ covers completely different tasks and responsibilities depending on the company, industry, experience, etc.
I can´t think of another role, that differs so much in real life compared to the description you heard during the job interview. Hands down – you are doing WAY more than you think. And unless you take a step back, map your tasks & to do´s, grasp the real scope of the role and review what you are spending your time on – it´s very unlikely that feeling of overworked-stressed- no time for a pee- will ever go away.
So find 30 min in your schedule, grab a pack of colorful post-its (cause its more fun) and find a white wall. The door will do just as well.
If you have an office for yourself,- awesome. If not – do it at home!
STEP ONE: Map all the areas you are responsible for or get to work on a daily bases. Most often it looks something like this:
CEO
Senior Management Team
Office
Events
HR
Finance
......
STEP TWO: Now take every area and use a separate post-it to indicate the task you have to deal with. Use 1 sticky note per task. It might go something like that:
CEO (big post-it)
Inbox (smaller post-it)
Travels (smaller post-it)
Personal needs (smaller post-it)
Meetings (smaller post-it)
Expenses (smaller post-it)
etc…
Take your time, do it área by área, task by task. If you do it alone, it helps to have your calendar open and taking a look at the previous month.
If you have a chance to do it with other Assistants of your company during your monthly Admin meeting,- even better! This way you help each other to remember the stuff you do automatically. And also see how Assistants in the same company can be working on the entirely different tasks depending on the department, Executive and other factors.
Once you´ve done all the categories, take a step back and look. The wall by this time is often covered by 40 – 50 post-its. This is an extremely useful exercise for your sanity (yes you are doing A LOT, you are not somewhat failing because some things are delayed!). And also it´s a wonderful reminder of how extremely important and wide scoped your role is!
It´s also very handy to prepare for your annual performance review while looking through the lens of these categories. This way you´ll step into the meeting with your Exec way more confident and also way better equipped, because you are now capable of speaking their language – categories, sectors, numbers, and scope.
But most importantly - now you are very much aware of how important your Assistant role is for the company! And that you should feel all the confidence in the world when asking for a raise!