#JOB DESCRIPTION FOR PERFECT ASSISTANT SERIES#

The secretary of those days has gone the way of the carbon copy and been replaced by the executive assistant, now typically reserved for senior management.

#JOB DESCRIPTION FOR PERFECT ASSISTANT SERIES#

Man on the Phone, 2006, painted polyester resin, 27.25′ x 11′ x 7′, permanent installation, Cité Internationale, LyonĪmong the most striking details of the corporate era depicted in the AMC series Mad Men, along with constant smoking and mid-day drinking, is the army of secretaries who populate Sterling Cooper, the 1960s ad agency featured in the show. In this article, Duncan, a longtime recruiter of C-suite executive assistants, argues that a good assistant is a crucial productivity booster for a busy executive-one that offers a solid ROI if he or she is deployed correctly. Yet while companies seem to have embraced that logic by outsourcing work to vendors or to operations abroad, they ignore it back at headquarters. Generally speaking, work should be delegated to the lowest-cost employee who can do it well. Some companies may see a type of egalitarianism in this assistant-less structure-believing that when workers see the boss loading paper into the copy machine, it creates a “we’re all in this together” spirit.īut as a management practice, that approach rarely makes economic sense.

In their zeal for cutting administrative expenses, numerous organizations now count on highly paid middle and upper managers to arrange their own travel, file expense reports, and schedule meetings.

As technology has transformed the workplace and organizations have downsized, companies have sharply reduced the ranks of administrative assistants.

Job description for perfect assistant