Productivity Training for Executive Assistants & Directors

Training to Improve Executive Assistant & Director Productivity

 

This innovative and unique Executive Assistant & Director productivity training program has been developed to help improve the productivity and overall working relationship between Executive Assistants and their Directors or General Managers. Most senior executive’s understand that a good Executive Assistant can save them valuable time. Typically however, there is a lot of wasted time and duplication of work! This leads to poor productivity outcomes and increased frustration when the partnership is not working as well as it should.

 

Ensuring there are agreed strategies for setting and maintaining common objectives and expectations is absolutely vital. However, often this just doesn’t happen. People just get busy and tend to assume things are going okay. There is rarely time to reflect honestly on their working relationship and workplace processes to see if productivity improvements can be made.

 

And that’s exactly what this program aims to do. Create a facilitated forum where nagging productivity issues can be teased out and worked on. Uniquely, we don’t just work with the Executive Assistants, we also ask their bosses to be a part of this program!  The results have typically been outstanding.

 

Executive Assistant Director Productivity Training Overview

Joint Productivity Questionnaire

The Executive Assistants and Directors or General Managers firstly undertake a customised but anonymous Productivity Questionnaire before the training is undertaken. The results highlight many opportunities for individual and collective improvement. Both groups go through the results of the survey separately.  No names are identifiable.

They then work separately and finally jointly with the facilitator to develop an agreed action plan to improve the way they work together.

 

Executive Assistant Training Session

We start out with the Executive Assistants exploring a range of ideas and strategies that they can use to become even more productive than they may already be. We explore such things as:

  • The role of an Executive Assistant
  • Tips to be more organised and productive
  • Prioritising and Planning for effectiveness
  • Working with multiple bosses
  • Setting common objectives and expectations
  • Coping with stress
  • Taking initiative
  • Using our Technology to work smarter not harder
  • Managing my boss’s Calendar and Emails

 

At the end of this session, each Executive Assistant will have a list of items both collectively and individually they would like to explore further with their Director.

 

Session with Directors/General Managers

The facilitator will then work separately with the Directors/General Managers to identify opportunities for improving productivity between themselves and their Executive Assistants. Much of this is drawn out of the Productivity Questionnaire. We also explore such things as:

  • Delegating more and letting go
  • Setting common objectives and expectations
  • Using Technology to work smarter not harder
  • Managing my email with my Executive Assistant

 

In the final session, the Directors and Executive Assistants will come together to develop collective and individual actions plans for productivity improvement.

 

Features

  • Director/Executive Assistant Training Productivity Questionnaire
  • One Month of Follow Up by Facilitator

 

Key Outcomes

 

  • Improved clarity around roles and expectations of the Executive Assistant
  • Opportunities for productivity improvement for EA’s and their bosses
  • Smarter use of technology to save time (eg. Using Microsoft Outlook  and MS OneNote )
  • Increased trust between Executive Assistants and Directors/General Managers
  • Improved communication and common understanding
  • Better joint Planning and Prioritising
  • Increased ability for Executive Assistants to better  manage up
  • Less frustration lower stress levels for the Executive Assistants
  • Executive Assistants empowered to take more initiative

 

Delivery Options

The program can be run with the entire Executive Leadership team and their Executive Assistants or it can be modified to work with just the EA’s or even just two people if required. Contact us to see how this might work in your situation.

 

If you are looking for some in-house training aimed more at the productivity and efficiencies of Executive Assistants alone, then you may be interested in our Microsoft Outlook Training for EAs.  

And we also have an Outlook for Executive Assistants training session I run online that anyone can book into. You can view that here.