Can COVID19 make your Assistant career bulletproof?

Every you turn, there´s pretty much only one thing only everybody talks about - COVID19. Regardless of where you are in the world, most probably you are already working remotely.

Some Assistants work with Executives that are constantly on the go - so having your boss not present physically is something you are comfortable with. Meanwhile, other Assistants are used to working face to face and shoulder to shoulder with their managers. So being completely remote brings a new set of challenges. And finally, some Assistants get laid off or worry that they might due to a shrinking economy. Which is scary and paralysing.

What is true though for most of the Assistants,- we have more spare time now than ever. There´s no commute, no dressing up for the office, no preparing meeting rooms or putting catering in place. If your role also covers some areas of office management,- today is the day when you have some spare time to review your to-do list and recalibrate your focus.

So what can Assistants do with their spare time? LEARN.

The nature of most Admin professionals is the eagerness to learn. Assistants are cut from a very special cloth - they are a the ¨Jack of all traits¨ yet they also master pretty much everything they do. Now it´s a good time to catch up not only with self-development and leadership topics, but also with an industry your company is in. Or maybe you rather spend time learning human dynamics and negotiations? 

I found myself learning about Computer Science at Harvard this week. As I am currently in a Tech Company - so the work-from-home weeks are a great time for learning something that you always wanted, but never had time.

World´s most prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford opened their expensive online training programs. FOR FREE. Coursera - probably the biggest online training platform does the same thing. You can find pretty much ANY course you are interested in on those. The same thing goes for LinkedIn Learning - super quality training material that will teach you anything,- from Project Management to Public Speaking. And of course, there are wonderful channels tailored directly for Assistants and Admin professionals:

https://www.practicallyperfectpa.com/

http://executivesecretary.com/

https://www.allthingsadmin.com/

https://www.theassistantroom.com/

Or maybe you prefer to look inwards and learn how certain departments work inside of your company?

Maybe you can give an extra hand for Marketing or HR departments? And understand better how they work? Or now it might be a good time to understand better the Finances of your company? Whatever that is - most departments are happy to get extra pair of hands & a brilliants brain at this moment. Just talk to your Executive and managers in the company. The initiative and leadership is what matters most in critical moments.

There´s not a single reason to not use this extra time that we have for learning. So we can emerge after crises as even more bulletproof Assistants!

Why TIMING is everything?

When was the last time you worked overtime?

Or missed your lunch break to finish the deck of BoD slides just in time?

Or skipped lunch, and coffee and stayed after office hours, just to ¨catch up with things¨? 

No wonder. Your Assistant role is demanding and full. Just as your calendar is.

But more often than not, we end up working extended hours not because of the amount of work that we have, but because we fail to plan. 

• We say yes to more things than we are capable of doing 

• We underestimate how long those tasks would take

• We overestimate our speed and efficiency 

And hey, that´s not to criticise your speed. Or productivity. The fact is that in the Assistant role, tasks naturally take longer to finish because you are interrupted ALL-THE-TIME. By the phone that´s ringing, by the catering that has to be signed off, by a colleague who can´t figure out how a printer works… You get it. It´s the nature of the role.

So we need to help ourselves with planning tasks in a real-life scenario (meaning constant interruptions) instead of a perfect one - nobody is in the office and nobody is asking me for anything.

The fact is, it will never happen! Unless you stay after hours once all your colleagues are gone. And that´s a no go. 

Help yourself to avoid over-planning. Understand how long your big tasks ACTUALLY take.

• Go through your calendar of the last month and identify what are the events that cause you overworking on a regular bases. Is it a BOARD meeting and preparation for it? Monthly operational review? Submitting expenses? 

• Note them down and once you´ve identified your biggest time stealers, understand how long those tasks take. 

• Next time you will be working on that particular task,- time it! Use one of the timers (most of them are free and available online). I use ATRACKER It´s free, simple and I use it as an APP on my phone. ATRACKER does precisely that,- it tracks time. It´s great that is requires minimum setup and allows you to focus on work rather than trying to figure out the fancy software.  

It sounds super simple, but it does miracles to your sanity when you are planning tasks with their real duration in mind. This way next time you´ll know, that getting slides done for a monthly meeting takes 7h rather than your optimistic 3 hours.  

Also, you could time how long your Executive takes on different tasks and plan his or her time better if you notice that certain meetings tend to overlap on a regular bases. 

Try it. I hope this helps to have less no-time-to-pee days!

Mapping Magic

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!