Businesses are increasingly hiring administrative and virtual executive assistants to manage daily tasks and help relieve the pressure off in-house staff.
The virtual administrative professional you hire must meet the same high standards you set your other employees; therefore, you must set them attainable key performance indicators (KPIs) as you do for all other staff members.
It’s these KPIs that are critical for your management team to measure performance and provide effective and actionable feedback.
This article allows you to gain knowledge of the essential things to consider when setting KPIs for your administration team.
Importance Of KPIs
Here are the most important reasons for a targeted approach to KPIs.
Understand Process Efficiency
When running a successful business, you must ensure that all your staff members are performing well and hitting targets at all times.
All administrative assistants must perform their roles efficiently. Therefore, you must evaluate an assistant’s performance based on how efficiently they are working through their tasks.
For example, the administrative and executive assistants you hire must always understand their role and perform their delegated tasks correctly and on time, and this should be one of their essential KPIs.
Delivering administrative tasks on time and correctly, with minimum fuss, should always be reflected in a high-performance score for their related KPIs.
Measure Progress Improvements
You must find an effective way of measuring progress and the improvements made by your administrative and executive assistants. Using KPIs that serve as a checklist can help evaluate long-term performance to ensure all your expectations are met.
Splitting your virtual assistant’s productivity into three categories: experience, work knowledge and attitude to their job, will help you make an accurate assessment.
Also, assessing how they interact with the rest of the staff and management team is vital to gauging their overall progress because it shows how well they interact with the rest of the workforce.
Avoid Performance Misunderstandings
When administrative professionals set the right KPIs based on their tasks, they must fully understand the targets to reach performance expectations.
Administrative assistants play a crucial part in the daily running of a business, so setting clearly defined targets helps them to maintain a consistently high performance.
A business always suffers when administrative professionals feel under an unfair amount of pressure; this often indicates that performance expectations are too high.
Avoid unwanted misunderstandings by setting achievable and realistic KPIs, which are agreed upon from the outset, and regularly check performance to ensure your virtual workers remain happy and motivated within their roles.
Critical KPIs For Your VAs
These are the most important KPIs you need to focus on first.
Organisational KPIs
Impeccable organisational skills need to be high on the KPIs required for an administrative assistant.
Having the organisational knowledge and skills to navigate peak periods and unexpected situations smoothly will always benefit your business.
As well as having outstanding organisational skills, administrative assistants require high emotional intelligence to deal with different situations and stay calm under pressure.
You may take a while to teach team members processes that benefit the whole company, but an excellent executive assistant can easily accommodate peak demand periods with strategic planning.
Communication KPIs
Excellent communication must be at the heart of any business to stand any chance of achieving long-term success.
Therefore, hiring assistants with outstanding communication skills is vital as they will be responsible for relaying important information passed down by company executives.
The executive assistant you hire will deal with other staff members and appropriate personnel outside your organisation.
Communication can occur via phone calls, emails, or video calling, so it is vital to assess how effectively they respond in any given situation and make communication one of their key performance indicators (KPIs).
Documentation Accuracy KPIs
Executive assistants must be accurate in everything they do, especially when dealing with sensitive company information.
For example, your executive assistant will be dealing with important clients. Hence, it is vital that all the information you give to clients is correct, and the same applies when passing on information about clients to company directors.
As well as client information, just as important is the documented information you hold on staff members, such as bank details, pension information, and sickness and holiday records.
If the information is incorrect or compromised, it will harm your business.
KPIs centred around producing accurate information documentation strategies for all staff, will help ensure your business runs smoothly.
Training KPIs
Devising the proper training KPIs for an administrative assistant is vital to ensure you are helping them and other administrative team members achieve their full potential.
As a company owner, you must form a training pathway that suits all staff and comes within your company’s fiscally sound budget.
Even the most talented and knowledgeable executive assistants will require additional training to keep pace with your industry’s current business trends and requirements.
Some training KPIs may be focused on leadership skills and how to handle complex situations within office dynamics so that you gain a positive outcome.
Other training KPIs will be centred around getting the best out of staff members in various departments by offering excellent leader support and management team skills at all times.
All training KPIs must benefit the employee and the company, regardless of whether the training is geared towards the admin or sales departments.
Time Management KPIs
Time management is vital to daily business life and must form part of an assistant’s performance evaluation.
Excellent time management skills must be displayed when scheduling appointments and managing your top executive’s email inbox.
If your hired assistant feels a project or task needs extra time to catch up, they must be resourceful and find creative solutions to help get back on track and ensure flawless execution.
Poor office dynamics can sometimes mean a project is heading towards not meeting a set deadline. It is only with exceptional time management skills that this can be avoided.
Collaboration KPIs
Only with excellent collaboration between all departments, such as admin, human resources, sales team, and IT, will your administrative assistant’s job become more accessible.
A clear understanding of each team member’s processes within their job role will help your EA hit the operational achievements your company strives for.
Your EA must be able to collaborate effectively with other people from other companies and essential clients. A high level of tact is required when dealing with clients, especially if there is an issue.
The more you’re able to measure how well your assistants collaborate, the more feedback you can provide that helps them strengthen this skill.
Call Us For A Free Consultation
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are vital to all businesses to help them evaluate staff performance, especially when you hire virtual remote workers.
Many businesses fear hiring remote workers because there is a lot of work involved in managing the performance of such workers.
Avoid this by calling us today for a free consultation to find out how we can help.
Our team can source, hire, train, and manage your remote workers so that you can dedicate more time to achieving growth that makes your business successful.
