Skip to content
When the world was forced to go remote, the demand for remote executive assistants (EAs) skyrocketed. EAs kept playing a pivotal role in supporting businesses from the comfort of their home offices, all without missing a beat when it comes to efficiency and productivity.
Yet, as with any transition, there are still challenges to overcome. One key challenge is how to measure the performance of executive assistants, especially when they work remotely. At Headroom Assistance, we believe in the power of performance metrics to support EAs’ professional development, and in this article, we’ll explore how to identify and use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to ensure your remote executive assistants are delivering their best and growing in their role.
Why Measure Executive Assistants’ Performance?
The Executive Assistant job is not just a short term gig, it’s a real career. That means that there is room to grow and improve in the role, like any other roles in your organization. If you’re investing time and money in someone, wouldn’t you want to be able to assess how they progress and perform?
It’s essential to keep your remote executive assistants performing at their best – because their output and performance is closely linked to their executive’s success and productivity.
Having a high-performing assistant ensures that you get the help you really need without having to micro-manage them, but also allows the EA to develop their skills and grow in their role (from Junior to Developing to Advanced and EA coach, or even Chief of Staff).
So, how do you ensure your executive assistants are giving it their all and are motivated to keep improving?
What KPIs can help measure Executive Assistants’ Performance?
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), born in the digital marketing realm, have seamlessly transitioned into the wider business and professional world. Today, they’re a growing trend in the corporate world and can significantly enhance performance, if you know which KPIs to consider for different domains and jobs.
Remote executive assistants are transforming the corporate landscape, offering increased productivity, longer operational hours, shorter downtimes, and room for innovation. However, as remote assistants become the norm, optimizing their performance is no longer an option but a necessity. The key to doing this effectively? Executive assistant KPIs.
Executive assistant KPIs are less about quantitative outputs and more about behaviors, results, tendencies, and other signs that can indicate the quality of the work you can expect from your virtual assistants. They are aspects of performance that can be taken as indicative of the total work quality of your remote executive assistants. To understand how to measure performance of executive assistant personnel, we need to look at the most important KPIs for executive assistants.
10 Examples of Critical Executive Assistant KPIs
When you work with remote EA services, they are usually the ones taking care of managing and training your assistant. They also assess their skills on a regular basis against relevant KPIs to make sure your EA is always up-to-date and fit to assist you.
1. Communication
Communication is going to be the number one metric of quality performance. In digital and remote workspaces, this is especially true.
At Headroom, we especially look at:
- An EA’s use of Slack and other communication or messaging channels,
- Responsiveness
- Their preparation ahead of meetings
- Proactivity
2. Coordination
A mixture of communication and organization. It is the ability to work well with others, to allow one’s actions to work in a complementary fashion to those of team members, and to get the job done together with you and other stakeholders.
3. Organization
Organization is about how a person manages their work, adheres to schedules, sets up reminders, and so much more. It is also about personal time management. All of these can be tested and measured simply.
At Headroom, we use our own inbox management system to organize and sort out emails to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. During our yearly performance reviews, Headroom EA Coaches look at how EAs set up and use folder structure, whether they hit inbox zero every day, but also their response rate and autonomy.
4. Collaboration
Closely related to coordination, collaboration is often about working in a coordinated way during the drafting phase of an idea, piece of writing, or other creative or intellectual endeavor. As you can see, many of these metrics have a great deal of overlap, making them even more trackable and usable.
5. Initiative
This KPI is a strong indicator of success in almost any endeavor. The tendency to self-motivate, self-start, or switch tasks is a highly important trait in remote executive assistants or anyone who works remotely.
6. Support
Supporting an executive is the key role of executive assistants. Therefore, we could say it’s the most critical KPI on our list. Functioning in a supportive role takes a particular mindset, and you can measure it by looking at the number and type of tasks they successfully completed in a given time, and compare it to your current to do list: is there anything else you could let go and delegate to them?
Learn more about how to delegate virtually anything to your EA, the hassle-free way.
7. Motivation
Closely related to having initiative, motivation is often more about the specifics of the job itself. Virtual assistants may be very motivated to do one type of job and not motivated at all to do another. Therefore, this metric is very specific to your business and what you expect them to do.
8. Scheduling
Related to motivation, organization, and initiative, proficiency in scheduling is linked to setting up good appointment times, communicating these arrangements, and being punctual in keeping up with schedules made. When assessing your EA’s scheduling skills, you should look at:
- How they set up events and meetings with all needed information
- How they priorities one meeting over another based on the executive’s needs
- Focus time: EA guards and adds focus time to calendars
- Placeholders: EA works with placeholders and keeps track of outstanding meeting requests and removes old/expired placeholders
- Correct titles: EA uses correct meeting / appointment titles following agreed way of working
- Titles are clear and calendar invites contains all required information
- Contact info: EA adds correct contact information to calendar invites
- Type of meeting: EA adds the correct type of meeting (e.g. video conference,call, F2F) with the correct links
Description box: EA adds required information to calendar invites description sections
9. Budgeting
Any employee with access to corporate accounts must be good at staying within a budget. Basic accounting may be necessary to track spending and good decision making is key when executive assistants have authority to make purchases on the company’s behalf.
10. Documentation
Indispensable among executive assistant KPIs, documentation in almost any executive-level tasking is critical. Executive assistants who are capable in this area will give you legible, clear, and organized records of important events, scheduling, key business contacts, priority tasks completed, not completed, and more. In so many professional settings, if it isn’t documented, it didn’t happen.
Of course, these are just examples of KPIs to measure an EA’s performance, and they have a great deal of overlap. There are more, and some may fit your company and your remote executive assistants better than others. Our team here at Headroom Assistance can help ensure you get trained and expert virtual assistants with a glowing track record.
Ready to experience the benefits of a virtual executive assistant for yourself? Reach out to us today to discuss the best EA solution for you.
