Is your executive assistant really helping you reclaim 15 hours of your time weekly, or are you simply paying for inbox management?
The answer to this question lies in measuring the quality of support you receive from your EA.
Executive assistant KPIs help you monitor the performance of your principal-assistant partnership, highlighting what’s working and what needs improvement.
In this guide, we’ll cover the key KPI categories, specific KPIs to measure, and tips for introducing the KPIs to your EA to create a shared sense of ownership and responsibility.
TL;DR – Executive Assistant KPIs
The following executive assistant KPIs can help you assess your partnership with your EA, including whether their support has a strategic impact on your performance:
- Time reclaimed by the executive
- Resolution time
- Calendar accuracy
- On-time delivery
- Turnaround time on after-hours requests
- Stakeholder satisfaction score
- Process improvements
Keep reading for an in-depth overview of each KPI, including why it matters to your executive-assistant partnership.
Why Most Executives Get EA Performance Measurement Wrong
Most executives fail at EA performance measurement because they conduct the evaluations as they would for other roles. They forget that the primary role of an executive assistant is to support the principal’s performance multipliers, not to contribute directly to the company’s bottom line.
Other mistakes that dilute EA performance reviews include:
- Measuring Activity Instead of Impact: Tracking what your EA does on a daily basis only shows their busyness, not their performance. An EA that responds to 500 emails daily shouldn’t be considered more productive if you’re still drowning in messages and your inbox is in chaos.
- Using Sales-Related KPIs: Executives often impose revenue-generation expectations on their EAs, although it isn’t part of their job description. Just because the EA oversees correspondence between you and your clients doesn’t always mean they can impact revenue, unless you are concerned that they lack the right soft skills for effective customer relationship management.
- Overemphasis on Speed: Some executives obsess over how fast their EAs respond to emails or prepare reports and meeting briefs. However, the focus should be on the output quality, so long as the EA completes the tasks within reasonable timeframes.
- Ignoring Compounded Value: Many executives often forget that performance improvements may become marginal over time as EAs learn their preferences and expectations. For example, your EA may reduce turnover for preparing meeting notes by 20% during the first quarter and 5% during the second.
By the end of the year, the change in turnaround times could be insignificant because they have already reached peak performance, so using the percentage change as a KPI may be misleading.
- Not Having Empathy for their EAs: Forgetting that your executive assistant is human, and thus bound to make mistakes from time to time, could result in a harsh review and overly critical feedback, even when the EA has been majorly exceptional.
Core Categories of Key Performance Indicators for EAs
Understanding the key tenets of EA KPIs helps executives cut through the noise and focus only on performance metrics that reflect the true status of their principal-assistant partnership.
The priority areas to monitor:
- Operational Efficiency: These KPIs measure how effectively your EA performs administrative tasks, such as maintaining conflict-free calendars, organizing your inbox, and completing routine tasks without delay.
- Executive Time Management: These metrics measure the ultimate EA value. They track how your executive assistant supports your performance multipliers by undertaking project management, chief of staff, scheduling, business partner, and personal assistant roles to help you reclaim your time.
- Stakeholder Management: These KPIs measure how effectively your EA manages relationships with key stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, and board members. Measures include response times to key stakeholders and average client satisfaction ratings.
- Decision Support: These KPIs help assess your EA’s problem-solving, research, innovation, and reporting skills. They also help you measure how well your EA leverages their executive assistant superpowers to anticipate and address executive needs.
- Reliability and Trust: These KPIs help measure consistency, confidentiality, and follow-through, the foundation on which strong executive-assistant partnerships are built.
7 Specific Executive Assistant KPIs That Matter
Now that you know which EA performance areas to focus on, the next step is to establish actual KPIs that genuinely reflect the true value that your remote executive assistant brings to your team.
The following KPIs can track executive assistant performance effectively:
1. Time Reclaimed by the Executive
Compare pre-EA and current time spent on administrative tasks like email correspondence, documentation, and calendar management.
Exceptional EAs handle these tasks efficiently, helping their executives reclaim up to 15 hours weekly.
Download our book, “The 29-Hour Workday,” to discover how the right EA helps you accomplish more within your usual daily schedule, while also reclaiming your time.
2. Resolution Time
This KPI tracks how quickly and efficiently your EA processes incoming communications, including emails, messages, calls, and Slack messages, and marks them as fully resolved without requiring your input.
Elite EAs identify priority emails and categorize messages based on themes, quickly getting your email inbox under control.
3. Calendar Accuracy
Monitor scheduling error rate, including conflicts, double-bookings, and incorrect time zones, to assess how well your EA protects your focus time, creates recovery buffers, and declines commitments that are misaligned with strategic priorities.
The best EAs aim for 99% calendar accuracy with errors being the exception, not the norm. Additionally, they are masters of calendar Tetris, scheduling strategic meetings when you are most productive.
4. On-Time Delivery
This KPI tracks the percentage of assigned tasks your EA completes within set deadlines without requiring follow-ups or reminders.
You can use the metric to assess your EA’s reliability and whether they have sufficient bandwidth to handle their workload. For example, EAs who deliver the assigned tasks late could point to a lack of competency/organization, or that they are overwhelmed with work.
5. Turnaround Time on After-hours Requests
Monitor how efficiently your executive assistant handles urgent or after-hours requests, such as last-minute flight cancellations and time-sensitive documentation.
However, you should define what constitutes an urgent request so your EA can distinguish between tasks that need immediate attention and those that can wait until the next day.
6. Stakeholder Satisfaction Score
This is a subjective KPI that measures your EA’s performance based on feedback from relevant stakeholders who interact with your assistant regularly.
You could ask stakeholders to rate their experience with your EA based on a score between 1 and 5. A high score shows that your EA represents you well, so you can trust them to stand in for you in meetings that don’t demand your in-person attendance.
7. Process Improvements
Count new systems, templates, or SOPs your EA has introduced to streamline workflows or improve the quality of support you receive.
Target three to five meaningful process improvements every quarter, such as meeting notes templates, learning how to use an EA tool you’ve procured, or creating vendor profiles and relationship protocols.
But how often do executive assistants achieve their KPIs?
It significantly depends on the EA’s soft/hard skills and experience supporting executives.
At ProAssisting, our executive assistants have 5+ years of experience supporting executives at global brands like Oracle, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, and have a track record of meeting their performance KPIs. This allows them to perform just as effectively as in-office assistants, undertaking up to 95% of the tasks, at 50-80% less cost.
Book a no-obligation call to discover how our ProAssistants leverage performance KPIs to support executives more effectively.
How to Introduce Executive Assistant KPIs Effectively
The purpose of executive assistant KPIs is to strengthen the principal-EA partnership, not strain it. Done well, EA performance reviews create shared clarity about expectations, celebrate meaningful achievements, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Here’s how to introduce EA KPIs that strengthen the executive-assistant partnership:
- Establish Baseline Measurements: Track your EA’s performance for at least the first month and use it as the baseline data. This helps set realistic improvement targets as opposed to introducing arbitrary targets.
- Engage Your EA: When onboarding your executive assistant, partner with your EA to set realistic KPIs that will help them know when they are succeeding or struggling at their work. This helps EA feel a sense of ownership of the KPIs, which motivates their performance.
- Prioritize Core Metrics: Resist the temptation to track all measurable metrics, as this could result in micromanaging your EA in the future. Instead, start with up to five KPIs that matter the most to create clarity and communicate expectations.
- Position KPIs as Tools for Mutual Success: Inform your executive assistant that the KPIs are only meant to give both parties visibility into impact and help both of you know if the partnership is working well, and areas for improvement.
- Refine the Metrics: Don’t treat the KPIs and metrics like static scorecards that you use month over month. Adjust the KPIs regularly so they remain relevant to your EA’s roles and responsibilities.
Common KPI Mistakes That Undermine Executive Support
Poorly introduced executive assistant KPIs often signal distrust and create tension between you and your EA. You also risk your EA becoming defensive, which creates a bad precedent for the executive-assistant partnership.
The following missteps when setting executive assistant KPIs can affect the quality of support you receive:
- Overreliance on Quantifiable Metrics: Some principals fall into the temptation of keeping unnecessary scores, like how many calls their executive assistants returned, which prompts their EAs to chase vanity metrics. Unfortunately, this is usually at the expense of undertaking tasks like calendar management, which solves scheduling bottlenecks for the executive.
- Comparing Performance with Industry KPIs: Pushing your EA to match industry KPIs often comes at the expense of ignoring whether the metrics you are tracking align with your actual needs. Suppose you read in an industry newsletter that exceptional EAs undertake at least five strategic projects monthly. Assigning your EA a similar number of projects could overwhelm them so that they aren’t able to support you effectively.
- Conflicting KPIs: Setting KPIs that demand superhuman speed and accuracy, such as “respond to all emails within 10 minutes” and “emails should be thoughtful and conversion-focused,” can frustrate your EA. Instead, ensure the KPIs align with each other and support your bigger partnership goals.
- Not Setting Up Your EA for Success: Setting KPIs like “reduce double bookings to zero” or “improve document preparation turnover by 30%” while not providing the appropriate executive assistant tools not only frustrates your EA but also makes it practically impossible for them to undertake their roles effectively.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Below are answers to common questions about executive assistant KPIs:
What Are the Benefits of Executive Assistant KPIs?
The benefits of executive assistant KPIs include:
- Set clear expectations for the EA role.
- Translate the EA’s daily activities into measurable results.
- Ensure the EA’s work directly supports the executive’s performance multipliers.
Can KPIs Differ Between Entry-Level and Senior Executive Assistants?
Yes. KPIs can differ between entry-level and senior executive assistants. For entry-level EA, the KPIs often include response time, task completion rate, and calendar management efficiency.
For senior EAs, the KPIs are more strategy-focused and could include stakeholder relationship management, a measurable increase in the executive’s productivity, and project management performance.
What Are the Most Challenging KPIs to Achieve?
Two of the most challenging KPIs for EAs to achieve include:
- Time reclaimed by executives as principals might take up more commitments with the freed-up schedules.
- Turnaround time on urgent requests, because an EA’s performance depends on the surrounding context, such as when the emergency arose.
How Often Should You Review EA Performance?
There is no limit to how often executives should review EA performance. Usually, executives should provide ongoing feedback, highlighting what their EAs are doing well and where they can improve to strengthen the partnership.
They could then schedule annual assessments to review the EA partnership from a bird’s-eye view and identify patterns in performance.
Conclusion
Tracking your executive assistant’s performance isn’t about micromanaging; KPIs create visibility into the partnership so you can quickly identify what’s working and what’s not. Additionally, monitoring the right KPIs transforms your EA’s support from a transactional relationship into a long-term relationship whose success both parties are interested in.
This is what separates our ProAssistants from other EAs.
At ProAssisting, our business model is built on providing EAs who strive to meet their executive’s expectations, including providing strategic impact. All ProAssistants have at least 5 years of experience supporting C-suites, which streamlines the onboarding process and sets them up for success.
Additionally, ProAssistants keep 75% of your monthly retainer, which helps keep them motivated.
Schedule a personalized call to discuss how to set effective KPIs when partnering with our ProAssistants.
