In a recent survey reviewed by Anthill Online, it was found that 68% of bosses spend more than two days out of a given week reading and responding to emails. Two days per week! And of that 68%, 72% say that this interferes with doing their actual jobs.
I must admit, those figures didn’t surprise me too much. In a previous role I worked for one of the smartest people I have ever met: a CEO for a fast growing ASX-listed company. He knew his strengths… and that organisation was not one of them. I was employed as his Executive Assistant to organize him: keep his diary up to date, manage his emails, and make sure he got to meetings on time, in the right location, with shoelaces tied and shirt tucked in!
In this instance there was no question, having someone to manage his inbox made perfect sense. I answered everything I could, and if there was something he needed to handle I’d flag it for him. That way, he could check his emails once or twice a day, and only worry about the less than 5% of emails I’d flagged. Because I knew everything that was going on in his business (and personal!) life, it made me more useful as an EA, and freed his time up to be more productive and focus on the bigger picture.
There have been a number of articles hitting the press recently about the “death of the assistant”. Hiring cutbacks have affected numbers of administrators and PAs within many organisations and there seems to be the expectation that executives should be able to perform many of the tasks that technology now allows everyone to do, such as typing documents, preparing their own presentation slides and processing expenses.
But what does this really mean for productivity? Richard Branson blogged recently about much he relies on his brilliant assistant:
“I am a great believer in the art of delegation and in sharing the load to make everyone more productive. Many people are using technology to make assistants a thing of the past. However, for those businesspersons in a position to do so, they may be missing a lot by going it alone.”
I have to agree with Richard on this one. Sometimes you really do need an EA or PA to assist you.
What do you think? Is a move away from delegating routine tasks costing companies value in the long run?
What are your thoughts on the correlation between delegation and productivity? Let me know in the comments below.
This post was written by Sarah. Before becoming a VA, Sarah held positions such as: Communications Manager, Asia Pacific (Cisco), Marketing Communications Manager (ING Real Estate) and Marketing Resources Manager (Deutsche Asset Management).
Communications is Sarah’s passion, and she believes that small businesses shouldn’t miss out on having a targeted communications strategy just because they don’t have a corporate budget.
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