Executive assistant responsibilities that can change the way you work

Executive assistant responsibilities go beyond taking notes and adding meetings to calendars. EAs are high-performing individuals who can become your right hand in less than 1 week if trained and onboarded correctly. 

Executives require individuals who integrate seamlessly into the startup culture. Executive assistant responsibilities must demonstrate proactivity, agility, rapid learning, resourcefulness, and adaptability to multiple roles.

Above all, execs seek executive assistants who are results-driven and motivated by achieving success.

When it comes to EAs, you can expect results and success in 6 main areas, which are structured in 6 buckets of responsibility.

What does an executive assistant do?

1. Calendar Management
2. Email Management
3. Travel and Expense Management
4. Meeting Support
5. Team Engagement
6. Operations and Special Projects

But that’s just the start. Job responsibilities of executive assistant exceed these boundaries and bring even more value to your organization – and can change the way you work.  

What is an executive assistant?

An executive assistant is a proactive person who is trained to become the right-hand of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CMOs, and other executives. An executive assistant’s main goal is to increase an executive’s productivity by solving problems and optimizing processes.

Although executive assistant duties used to be solely associated with administrative operations, the position has evolved to the point where today’s executive assistants handle company-wide operations, such as project management organization, oversight of specific daily operations, and even helping with board meeting preparations and decks.

Executive assistant responsibilities even extend to acting as a liaison between their senior executive and the rest of the team. Trusted EAs may even play a “fill-in” or “stand-in” role for their executives, representing them at meetings where the executive’s presence isn’t required. 

Delegate these 10 tasks to your EA and start working smarter.

Executive Assistant Role

What does a virtual executive assistant do? The executive assistant role can be as administrative or operational as the company needs. In any case, the role can be explained by exploring the benefits that C-suite executives and VPs get from working with such a person.

The best way to understand the job responsibilities of an executive assistant is with specific examples. Some of these might apply directly to you or another executive member.

Executive assistant responsibilities:

What does an executive assistant do?

Helping executives focus

• Executive assistants send action items first thing in the morning and again at EOD for the executive’s visibility, allowing them to stay focused on priority tasks.
• They block deep focus time on their exec’s calendar to allow for productive slots of time and do the same for personal appointments while still keeping track of all meetings.
• Executive assistants can be the first line of communication between the executive and their direct reports, and other stakeholders. 
• An EA can also create mind maps in Figma for new product ideas.

Presentation support and data research

• Executive assistants are capable of building decks for presentations, helping their executives save time.
• EAs are great at taking notes in meetings and then distributing action items, as well as following up on those action items post-meeting. 
• An EA supports executives by creating presentations for their next monthly operations review in a collaborative effort with their teams.
• They’re able to do data research on marketing dashboards (or any other specialized area) to find examples to present to other executives and leaders.
• The EA creates a Q&A document to share during town halls.

Calendar and email management

• Executive assistant responsibilities also include compartmentalizing the calendar to increase focus time and reduce the amount of back and forth needed to confirm appointments, scheduling meetings and 1:1s, resolving conflicting meeting times, managing email or Slack messages, and prioritizing and delegating to respective team members.
• Some of our EAs have unsubscribed their execs from the hundreds of newsletters that clogged their inboxes. Others block time for lunch and introduce new technology that helps record, take meetings, capture key items, and transcribe meetings.
• The role of an executive assistant also includes preparing for their executive’s OOO time, allowing them to disconnect and transition smoothly from online to offline periods. 

Executive travel planning and team offsites

• Executive assistant duties also encompass scheduling and organizing domestic and international trips, including booking and confirming flights, hotels, and transportation.
• EAs manage all travel expenses and create post-travel reports.
• Our EAs have also supported executives in booking travels for offsite as well as coworking options, and have identified or booked Airbnb’s for team members.
• When traveling, an EA plans dinner reservations, day trips, and commute times. All of this info can be saved in your calendar for easy access. Also, an executive assistant can research safety precautions, money exchange, and available forms of payment.

Project management tasks

• The roles and responsibilities of an executive assistant go beyond admin tasks and some of them look like project management tasks. 
• These tasks involve but are not limited to, implementing a new hire onboarding process, building playbooks for internal processes, driving performance evaluations, researching and comparing insurance policies and vendors, and managing tasks related to company culture and employee wellness.
• At Viva, one of our EAs has been given the task of creating an onboarding checklist for new hires, with minimal input. The team needed this checklist but it had never been done before. The EA researched the role and contacted team members to make sure this assignment was done successfully. The result was a checklist that included every step that the new hire had to follow, including who to reach out to for certain tasks.

Analyzing and improving processes

• The role of an executive assistant can also include analyzing and improving processes such as this example about a virtual executive assistant who supported her executive with the creation of a company-wide intranet that was organized and user-friendly. The request for this project was to improve the experience of accessing company information and policies.

The executive needed to have a tool that was cross-functional and collaborative,  communication through a process that was efficient, straightforward, and empowering for team members.

The executive assistant organized all available resources in internal repositories that would be easily accessed company-wide, compartmentalizing some confidential segments for specific audiences. After researching the best platform, the EA and executive decided to use Confluence from Atlassian and then migrated to Google Sites.

Support with direct reports

• For the executive’s direct reports and as part of her function as an executive assistant, the EA created surveys that would help with 360 feedback reports. She made sure that all were turned in by the ETA deadline by sending reminders 1 week and 1 day before. After collecting the surveys, the EA gathered all responses on a spreadsheet and proceeded to schedule 1:1s with the direct reports to review the feedback.

Reporting on expenses and billing

• Another role of executive assistants is supporting with reporting on expenses and billing. By creating an A/R Aging Report follow-up on past due A/R, and monitoring checks and payments, an EA can support the CFO on investment meetings or external audits.
• Executive assistants also support billing through invoice creation, monthly billing processes, and generating billing reports in Quickbooks.

Supporting projects for customer success

• EAs are capable of developing playbooks or internal handbooks based on customer experiences to drive the strategy across internal audiences.
• Also, executive assistants can create customer journey reports with metrics using analytics on CRMs like Hubspot.
• Executive assistants are great at driving strategic alignment with team members by piloting collaborative projects.

Implementing office organization systems

• The role of an executive assistant in implementing office organization systems can look like an EA who organizes and centralizes company documents in an internal spreadsheet repository.
• Depending on the area of support, EAs help create a department folder proposal for the team to organize by uploading documents like contracts, so everything is stored properly.

Benchmarking and planning

• To support benchmarking and planning, the executive assistant can create detailed spreadsheets for later reference and meeting templates to present results and new information every quarter.
• As part of her executive assistant responsibilities, the EA keeps an eye on newly backed and funded startups that are relevant to your industry.
• Executive assistants can also coordinate promotional merchandise from offshore production to local delivery, keeping in mind quality and pertinent details.

Driving team-building initiatives

• Executive assistant responsibilities also encompass leading team-building initiatives for direct reports and sometimes, company-wide. They find and deliver gifts and anniversary and birthday cards for team members.
• EAs can also order prizes for the winner of an internal challenge.
• Executive assistants at Viva have created “Modus Operandi” templates to facilitate communication and improve company culture in the startups they support. These Modus Operandi specify how an executive operates, their communication style, what the expectations are for direct reports, and tips and tricks as to how to work with them.
• EAs may also schedule a class/session for the whole team on relevant topics.

Supporting Leadership and Decision-Making as part of executive assistant responsibilities

One of our customers, the CEO of Gridwise, saved time and cognitive capacity by leveraging his EA and assigning her the following executive assistant responsibilities:

• Delegated repetitive tasks, such as onboarding new hires.
• Appointed the EA as the tool-adoption leader for the tech stack.
• Gave the EA access to his email so he reached inbox zero every day.
• Got an EOD Slack message with a summary of his email so he was still aware of what was going on without having to go through every single email.
• His EA attended all meetings, took notes, tracked action items, put decks together, and gave the CEO feedback on what they thought was most relevant.
• The CEO had shared their travel preferences so the executive assistant could book trips based on their preferences, along with a Notion page that included flight, hotel, coworking, restaurant, and car rental options.
• He texted or sent his EA a voice message whenever he thought of something important – it went out of his mind and got on her to-do list.

Balancing Multiple Responsibilities

This is a great example of how an executive assistant was able to balance multiple responsibilities in their role as executive assistant. This Viva EA wore many hats while supporting multiple Veho executives (CFO + VP of Strategy and Development).

In this case, the CFO delegated (with successful results) town hall and all-hands meetings, built a comprehensive OKR tracker for the financial team, and handled contractor billing to make sure the billed hours were correct and the process was timely.

EA-delegated tasks looked different for the VP of Strategy and Development. The EA created manuals for processes that were not being properly tracked because of the company’s expansion and fast growth.

The EA also supported the executive with investor lead sourcing by doing research, offering opinions on who seemed more likely to invest, booking meetings, and creating pre-meeting briefings for each.

Another task that the EA supported was creating a system that allowed the executive to go through his email in 20 minutes versus the 2 hours he was spending every day before the EA came on board. In this area alone, the executive assistant saves the executive several hours a week.

The executive assistant had been proactively doing these tasks, not waiting for specific instructions but by careful observation, understanding there was a need, planning a solution, and then executing this solution in a timely and structured manner. 

The ability to give and receive feedback is another role of an executive assistant. A skilled EA is checking in regularly with their executives to make sure that the work is exceeding their expectations and to seek their input about what could be improved.  

Conclusion:

Executive assistant responsibilities can be sorted into 6 buckets of support that may look very different depending on the executive’s needs.

It’s not the same support for a CFO as a CEO, but both can benefit from an executive assistant’s proactive approach to email and calendar management as well as process improvement, travel planning and expense management, team building, and benchmarking. All of these areas of responsibility that are taken on by the EA benefit the executive by reducing their cognitive load. 

The roles and responsibilities of an executive assistant go beyond administrative tasks. EAs are now viewed as strategic business partners who can enhance the productivity of an executive, their team, and ultimately, their company.This is our goal at Viva Executive Assistants.

We are in the business of supporting startup executives to become more productive every day by pairing them with exceptional executive assistants who will move the needle forward on what matters the most to each role.