meetings

Have you ever heard some managers saying that they don’t have secretaries, assistants, that they don’t need them? However, have you also heard them complaining about the lack of time? Those same managers end up being the most expensive secretaries/assistants, since they invest too much time in tasks that aren’t theirs instead of doing what they actually can add value.

We, the secretaries, assistants, do quickly those tasks which are tedious for managers. So I am going to detail some of them to value our profession:

Telephone: phone philtre, call forwarding.

Internal organization: consumables and internal supplies.

Organizing meetings: Managing conference rooms, sending the agenda, welcoming visits, writing minutes and doing the Gantt chart to follow tasks to do.

Presentation: doing, updating. Coordination among different people who are part as speakers.

Visits, trips, events: Preparation: presentation of budgets. Organization: travel dossier, visit agenda of guests and their companions, event, congress. Afterward: gathering results, report and checking invoices.

Documentation: Manuals: welcome, corporate image, procedures, communications. Digitalisation, classification, revision, updating, file, localization, document templates and their link to a database for their automatization, the outline of a blueprint, physical presentation of documentation: printing, binder, following up.

And of course, being always CO!

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With this post I want to pay tribute to all women who sometime decided to start-up a business, especially my admiration for Virtual Assistants. The 19th November is the Women’s Entrepreneurship Day. It seeks to make visible and value their effort, taking into account that they are still in minority in the world of business which is mostly male.

Dana Kanze, BSE (Wharton) and PhD (Columbia), researched about the behaviour difference and the labour market inequality. She researched the effort and the added difficulties had to make by women entrepreneurship to convince the investors with the aim to finance their project. The result of this research was that despite being the same way that women and men presented their projects, they engaged a different interest in potential investors depending on the gender of the entrepreneur. The investors got interested about projects asking man entrepreneurs about their company’s potential, promotion, and achievements. Meanwhile, woman entrepreneurs were asked about the company’s prevention measures, possible losses, evaluating their responsibility and safety. Even if the investors were women, they asked to woman entrepreneurs the same kind of questions. The conclusion was that when the project was presented by a woman entrepreneur, investors held quite a few prejudices, thereby perpetuating gender inequality.

Despite these difficulties, the woman entrepreneurs who got redirect the interest of investors answering questions about prevention framed in promotion, got higher funds for their start-ups.

Here is the link where she explains it in a TED talk very interesting. It’s 14:30 minutes: Dana Kanze: The real reason female entrepreneurs get less funding | TED Talk.

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