Executive assistants primarily have an administrative focus and play a central role in how a company runs. They are expected to quickly learn how the executive thinks and functions, and leverage the knowledge to help their principals’ success.

Also, EAs often double up as personal assistants, so principals can reclaim their time.

In this article, we’ll discuss executive assistant tasks and responsibilities, including how they impact company performance.

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How the Executive Assistant Role Has Evolved (And Why It Matters)

Previously, an executive assistant was considered simply a secretary tasked with typing and printing documents or picking up office calls on behalf of their ‘boss.’

However, the role has evolved to include leveraging technology, especially project management and CRM tools, to address scheduling bottlenecks on behalf of executives and founders.

Also, executive assistant roles now extend beyond the office walls. They double up as personal assistants who help their executives achieve their desired work-life balance.

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Core Executive Assistant Tasks

Executive assistants are integral to their principals achieving their personal and business goals. Usually, most executive assistant tasks are repetitive regarding the required input and time frame. An example of a repetitive task would be scheduling a meeting on the first Monday of the month to review business performance.

Here are common tasks you can delegate to your executive assistant:

  • Calendar Management: Scheduling is at the core of the EA realm. Proper calendar management helps optimize the executive’s productivity and efficiency, while also saving them up to 15 hours weekly.
  • Documentation: EAs are proficient in drafting, editing, and formatting essential documents like reports, presentations, and memos to support executive decision-making. Their attention to detail ensures the documents are clear and accurate, which helps enhance their executives’ image and perceived professionalism.
  • Correspondence: An EA is often the first point of contact for any communication that requires the executive’s attention. Communication handling as an EA involves taking phone calls, screening and prioritizing emails, and streamlining coordination across departments.
  • Travel Planning: EAs help plan their executives’ domestic and international travel arrangements. This sometimes includes coordinating flights, booking accommodations, and securing local transportation for the executive and their company (family, friends, or associates).
  • General Tasks: Executive assistants often undertake numerous one-off tasks besides the repetitive roles. An example would be running home to pick up a file and bringing it back to the office, or driving to the airport to pick up a business associate.

High-Impact Projects Handled by Executive Assistants

Executive assistants don’t just manage calendars; they drive change. From coordinating cross-functional initiatives to leading event planning and process improvement, EAs take on high-impact projects that push businesses forward.

The right EA can help you handle the following high-stakes projects.

Organizing Board Meetings

Executive assistants are often responsible for coordinating and supporting quarterly or annual board meetings, ensuring high-touch hospitality for the guests.

The stakes are higher if the meetings are expected to last several days, as the logistics can be a nightmare.

Common EA duties and responsibilities when hosting board meetings include:

  • Preparing and organizing board materials and agendas.
  • Coordinating with board members and internal departments.
  • Ensuring a seamless experience that reflects well on the executive.
  • Managing logistics: venues, accommodations, meals, and entertainment.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Oversight

Executive assistants who are deeply integrated into their principals’ networks and priorities are often tasked with managing the CRM, which directly impacts the company’s bottom line.

Their core tasks include:

  • Nurturing relationships with relevant stakeholders like clients, vendors, and regulatory bodies.
  • Tracking communications, follow-ups, and important dates.
  • Creating reports and summaries for executive use.
  • Updating and maintaining records of key relationships.

Onboarding New Employees/Clients

While onboarding is often repetitive, it becomes a high-impact project when the EA is the first point of contact. Your EA is often your representative during the onboarding process and sets the tone for the employee/client relationship with your company.

Common tasks include:

  • Scheduling welcome meetings and preparing onboarding materials.
  • Introducing the new employee/client to internal systems or teams.
  • Communicating the company’s culture, mission, and vision.
Professional taking notes in a notebook during a meeting or presentation.

Executive Assistant Responsibilities

Executive assistant tasks are quite different from their responsibilities. Tasks are often micro and specific, such as preparing reports, setting up emails, or scheduling meetings. However, with the right executive assistant skills, EAs can wear multiple hats, including:

  • Business Partner: Preparing briefs and reports for upcoming stakeholder meetings or presentations.
  • Chief of Staff: Acting as a point of contact between the executive and staff, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders.
  • Project Manager: Preparing project charters, status reports, and dashboards to help track deliverables, timelines, risks, and dependencies.
  • Assistant/ Scheduler: Organizing the executive’s calendar and solving scheduling conflicts.
  • Personal Assistant: Providing non-office support to the executive, such as securing travel visas, booking vacations, and planning family events.

The highlighted performance multipliers help executives achieve what Ethan Bulls calls a “29-hour workday,“ which basically means accomplishing more tasks within the same timeframe. Download the book for free and discover how EA support can help you increase your productivity significantly.

How to Prioritize Executive Assistant Tasks for Maximum Output 

Exceptional EAs understand that they play a pivotal role in ensuring smooth daily operations and optimal output. However, balancing a long to-do list can be daunting if the tasks are not properly prioritized. 

To maximize output, you must partner with your EA to identify your top priorities, which in turn influences how you delegate tasks:

  • Understand Your Vision and Priorities: Regularly engage your EA in strategy-related conversations to ensure they stay informed on your current focus areas. This helps them determine your short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals, which in turn dictate their EA roles.
  • Classify Tasks by Urgency: Integrate the Eisenhower Matrix into your workflows to help your EA distinguish between tasks that require immediate attention and those that are important but not urgent. This ensures your EA doesn’t waste time on low-importance, low-urgency tasks that don’t add value to your executive role.
  • Leverage Technology to Stay Organized: Provide access to essential executive assistant tools to help your EA manage tasks, track deadlines, and communicate progress effectively. 
  • Regular Check-Ins and Adjustments: Having regular sit-downs with your EA can help you maximize your output since it allows you to discuss progress and ensure priorities remain aligned. It also provides an opportunity to pivot and adapt quickly to changing circumstances, especially when your schedule fluctuates or when unexpected opportunities or issues arise.
  • Batch Similar Tasks Together: Part of onboarding your executive assistant is to highlight related tasks that should be handled together to save time otherwise wasted during context switching. For example, email communication and correspondence could happen during dedicated sessions (morning, midday, and end-of-day) instead of your EA checking their inbox with each notification.
Woman writing in notebook while working on laptop.

How to Build Cross-Functional Workflows With an Executive Assistant 

Executives must keep in mind that their EAs can’t operate in silos; they must collaborate across different teams and departments to support their principals effectively. 

As the executive, you’ll have a central role in integrating your EA into the company’s cross-functional workflows, where they can support your performance multipliers more effectively.

The following approaches can help you build a strategic partnership with your EA that cuts across relevant departments: 

  • Map Out Key Processes: Outline processes that require collaboration between your office and other executives or teams. For example, if you need reports from different departments, it’s important to define the timeline, format, and expectations for these reports. Having clear processes in place ensures that each department knows what is expected and when it is due.
  • Clarify Roles: Define your EA’s roles and responsibilities, including email management, scheduling, and project management. Also, outline relevant roles that don’t fall within their scope. For example, while most EAs expect to prepare reports for their executives, you might have delegated that role to another team member. 
  • Implement Standardized Communication: Communication breakdown can quickly derail workflows. As such, it is crucial to establish executive-assistant communication protocols that align with those of the organization to ensure seamless information flow. 
  • Use Collaborative Tools: Take advantage of executive assistant tools that support real-time updates, file sharing, and task management to foster collaboration with your EA. Your EA can also help integrate these tools across the department or company, including training team members and granting appropriate system access.
  • Grant Your EA Appropriate Authority: A common bottleneck in most cross-functional workflows is when every communication or decision needs the executive’s input or approval. Allow your EA to make decisions and communicate on your behalf, but within defined boundaries. For example, you could allow them to approve payments for invoices under $2,000 for your travel arrangements.

How to Strengthen Communication Between Executives and Teams

Here’s the thing: workflows alone don’t address the human element that supports or hinders executive effectiveness. Even the most sophisticated systems need seamless information flow, with EAs playing a central role.

Here are strategies to improve collaboration among executives and their teams:

  • Regular Check-Ins: Your EA can schedule weekly or bi-weekly team meetings where you can provide updates, clarify expectations, and receive feedback, ensuring teams are aware of their roles in supporting strategic goals.
  • Ensure Transparency: EAs can help ensure that relevant information is disseminated across teams in a timely, transparent manner. This could involve sending out meeting minutes, summarizing key points from discussions, or sharing company updates that affect all departments.
  • Establish a Feedback Loop: Create opportunities for teams to share open, honest feedback that can help improve cross-functional collaboration and the company’s overall performance.
  • Have Clear Communication Protocols: Implement a tiered communication system that accounts for message urgency and importance. For example, teams could use Slack for messages that require attention within the hour and emails for issues that could wait until the next business day. 
  • Position Your EA as your Communication Liaison: One of the most important roles your EA can play in strengthening communication is serving as the point of contact for executives. Their roles could include filtering and classifying messages, handling stakeholder questions, and forwarding only high-impact messages to executives.
Entrepreneur reviewing paperwork beside open laptop.

What Makes an Executive Assistant Truly Indispensable

The right executive assistant often feels like your extension or double. They know how you think and operate, and leverage the knowledge to step up during high-impact situations. Below are the core traits of an indispensable EA.

Implicit Trust

An executive assistant should have a strong relationship with their principal and establish themselves as dependable.

The EA should complete assigned tasks accurately, efficiently, and with minimal oversight. This frees the executive to focus on high-level decisions.

Being a ‘Utility Player’

An indispensable EA is versatile, not limited to their job description. They are flexible and resourceful, which makes them the first person the executive turns to when there is ‘chaos,’ such as scheduling conflicts or payment delays.

This utility mindset transforms the EA from being merely an assistant to a business partner and chief of staff to the executive.

Ability to Think Like an Executive

An indispensable EA should deeply understand the executive’s preferences, priorities, and working style. This helps them anticipate the executive’s needs and make judgment calls that reflect the executive’s tone, values, and priorities.

By internalizing the principal’s mindset, the EA becomes an extension of the executive, ensuring continuity, consistency, and strategic alignment across the company.

Advanced Executive Assistant Tasks That Increase Executive Leverage

As your EA gains experience and the executive-assistant partnership strengthens, they can take on more strategic roles beyond just answering emails. You can trust them with high-impact tasks that support and optimize the executive’s capacity.

Executive assistant tasks that have a strategic impact on the executive include:

  • Strategic Calendar Management: Your EA can transition from simply scheduling meetings to being a master at playing calendar Tetris. For example, they can schedule high-impact strategic meetings during your most productive hours.
  • Decision Support: Whenever you are about to make a significant decision that will affect your company’s performance, you should always consider bouncing your ideas off someone else before taking the final step. A seasoned EA can play that role for you. Exceptional EAs support executive decisions by researching relevant topics, synthesizing the information, and preparing reports on which you can make data-driven choices. 
  • Event and Conference Coordination: As an executive, you are regularly involved in or invited to high-profile events or industry conferences. The best EAs leverage their high-touch hospitality skills to plan and coordinate events, including managing logistics like booking the venue and organizing transport for other executives attending the meeting.
  • Stakeholder Management: Your executive assistant can help you manage relationships with key stakeholders, including clients, board members, and external partners. A seasoned EA will also amplify your influence and reach by helping you stay connected to essential stakeholders.
  • Onboarding Clients and Employees: Many executives find onboarding to be repetitive and tend to do it passively over time. However, considering its significance to long-term stakeholder relationships, it is essential that it is thorough and sets the tone for future engagement. Your EA can take on the onboarding role, including scheduling welcome meetings, introducing new employees to the rest of the team, and preparing onboarding materials.
Professional woman working on a laptop while talking on the phone at a home office desk.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Let’s wind up by answering commonly asked questions about executive assistant tasks.

What’s the ROI of Hiring an Executive Assistant?

The main challenge in determining the ROI of hiring an executive assistant is that you get one to free up your time or solve scheduling bottlenecks, rather than to increase your company’s bottom line.

For example, getting a free afternoon, on a weekday, to attend your kid’s baseball game or catch up with an old friend passing through town often means you have someone else (an executive assistant) representing you in a philanthropic board or meeting potential clients/vendors. As such, it is best to calculate ROI based on your freed-up time, which could be between 5 and 15 hours weekly.

How Do I Know If I’m Ready to Hire an Executive Assistant?

Generally, an executive assistant should be one of your first hires, way before you start bringing other workers on board. Executive assistants are central to creating standard operating procedures, as they can be the point person who knows where everything is, taking administrative overhead off your plate.

What Are the Red Flags to Watch for When Hiring an Executive Assistant?

Some red flags to watch for when hiring an executive assistant include:

  • Candidates who lack prior experience providing support to founders and executives.
  • Vague explanations about their tasks and responsibilities in past EA roles.
  • Inability to expound how they ‘move the needle’ or bring real value to their executives.

Can Executive Assistants Manage Team Communication and Workflows?

Yes. Executive assistants can manage team communication and workflows by serving as the point of contact for the principals they support. For example, they can filter and classify emails by urgency and importance, forwarding only strategic-impact-level messages to executives. Additionally, they can personalize and disseminate information to relevant teams, breaking communication silos within departments.

Conclusion

This article covers everything you need to know about executive assistants’ tasks and responsibilities, including how their input can help you or your company flourish. The right EA has somewhat superpowers in the way they leverage their organizational, communicational, and tech proficiency to support executives.

Ready to delegate the tasks and responsibilities highlighted in this guide so you can reclaim your time?

ProAssisting helps founders and C-suites hire remote executive assistants who function as an extension of your team. Our plans start at $3,300 per month and consist of daily support from a US-based EA. Also, we maintain a 3:1 executive-to-assistant ratio, guaranteeing that your ProAssist is available on short notice.

Take the first step. Schedule a free consultation to learn how our ProAssistants can help you reclaim your time and boost your productivity.