Integrate modern assistants optimally

The video for the podcast episode
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Introduction

Nice to be back for another episode of Digital 4 Productivity and the fifth chapter, the book “Using digital tools effectively”. As you know, once a week or so there is an audio summary of the chapter here, not a reading, but the essential impulses.

And the idea of the fifth chapter is “Integrate modern assistants optimally”. To perhaps state the essence of this chapter up front, I am a big opponent of abolishing assistants, because if they are used correctly, they are an absolute productivity booster. Personally, I’ve always used assistants as an employee and managing director of a limited company, and I’ve also been working with an assistant as a self-employed person since day one and I wouldn’t want to be without one. I’ll tell you more about how I do this as a freelancer in this chapter.

Yes, in the tried and tested form of the introductory story. Do you know that? You are a manager and can no longer get on with your day-to-day business. Your e-mail inbox is overflowing and since your secretary has been rationalized away, you have to organize your own travel, for example. Of course there is the central travel office, but it is more of a hindrance than a help. And since their telephone line is always busy, it is ultimately quicker if you plan everything yourself.

You also coordinate the customer appointments yourself and the meeting rooms for customers, which you always have to book, including coffee and cookies. Recently, they once kindly asked a younger colleague if she could take over because they were really short of time. But the colleague then asked her what she could think of. Yes, in the past, I know that, my father used to be a top manager, I grew up in a top manager’s household and he had a secretary. That was quite normal back then. What always irritated me a bit was that my father dictated verbatim with a dictation machine, which made me think, couldn’t it be more efficient to do it with keywords? But times and speeds change. But the whole issue of pre-organizing mail, the whole issue of organizing travel was all done by his secretary back then.

Yes, today assistants are often simply abolished instead of thinking about how they can be used productively. And as far as I’m concerned, I maintain that any manager who books trips themselves, who builds charts themselves, sorry, are overpaid clerks and unfortunately I see that far too often. Managers shouldn’t build charts and shouldn’t book trips, they should work on the company above all else and develop their team accordingly and create the right framework conditions.

The main problems

Yes, so what have I identified as the three main problems in this book? Firstly, your assistant is simply rationalized away and you have to fill the gap, even though you have your hands full. Secondly, where there is assistance, it is used for activities that are below the assistant’s ability and is then abolished because it is of no use. I often experience that myself, I sometimes experience it myself. The big catch is, of course, that no one can do it as well as you and it is always a challenge to delegate things and to take the time to brief and develop an employee or even an external assistant so that he or she can take over the activities that you have been doing so far.

Yes, and the third thing to say is that even the task of the assistant can be optimized by not always having them do the same lolo jobs, but also to say that where jobs that an assistant does can be automated, it definitely makes sense to automate them and to develop the assistants accordingly.

Yes, as I said, I always have this issue of assistants and entire hierarchical levels being abolished. And then you wonder why there’s no more management when you end up with 40-50 employees. My father used to tell me that experience has shown that you can manage a maximum of ten people quite well if each person eats up around ten percent of your own workforce. That was my father’s experience. Then we’re down to nine, because they might need another ten percent to develop their own topics accordingly. That’s why I don’t believe in such large leadership spans, because then they simply don’t have any time left for leadership. Leadership doesn’t happen on its own; leadership is exhausting. I’ve been doing this myself for years, I’ve also led larger teams and, against this background, it’s work and you have to plan accordingly. Just like the topic of email processing. So I also consider this topic leadership, where it is said that you don’t need it today, the young people can all do it themselves. I believe that leadership is becoming an increasingly important bottleneck and it is all the more important to free up managers for leadership tasks. And that’s where assistants can also help.

Yes, the second thing to say. Many simply do things where I say that the assistants are rarely developed further, are not managed properly, always do the same things, where you say, okay, um, to coordinate an appointment somehow, I can also use an appointment booking link, for example, then you really don’t need the assistant for that. And last but not least, even the assistants themselves, there are far too few automation options being used. For example, when I have this podcast here, my assistant transcribes it and he doesn’t do this by hanging around for hours behind the sound recording, but instead he uses a service called Happy Scribe and then he revises things. For example, my assistant asked me a few months ago whether AI would make him unemployed. And I told him very clearly, nNo, but they will, I expect them to become much more productive than they are today by using AI, among other things. And that is very, very important.

Assistants are abolished

Yes, the issue that I also have, this issue when assistants are abolished or perhaps when they start a new company. When I founded my new company, I decided relatively quickly that I didn’t need an extra office because I was almost only out with customers. This saving on fixed costs has carried me through Corona well, for example, because I simply didn’t have any fixed costs for office rent, for example.

I also have no fixed costs for personnel. Now you say, wait a minute, you have an assistant. Yes, I have an assistant as a virtual private assistant from Strandschicht. I took the idea from Timothy Ferris’ book “The 9-Hour Workweek” and I’ve been working with service providers like that ever since. And they also exist in Germany. They are also very good. It’s just that their hourly rates are naturally not cheap. Until recently, mine cost me €9 an hour. He now costs me €11 an hour, lives in Eastern Europe and therefore has a completely different cost of living than we have here. This makes the cost difference understandable. So that’s the idea behind Virtual Private Assistance. When you say I might not want to outsource the whole thing abroad, I don’t have a good feeling about it. I always say that the likelihood of an employee going behind your back is much higher than with an external service provider. Because here you have a clear contractual agreement. And if an employee there misappropriates data, uses information incorrectly, goes behind their back, this is immediately publicized on social media and then this provider is off the market. So you have a normal DPA, including the data processing clause and all these things.

And the provider Stranschicht, with whom I work, is a German company and the employees live in Eastern Europe and mine is a doctor of business administration who did his doctorate in Germany. And if you read the emails, you can’t tell the difference that it’s not native German. So against this background, you clearly use VPAs if you don’t have the clearance to hire someone. Or if you say, like me for example, I don’t want to organize extra office capacity for this or I don’t want to hire two right away, because realistically you need a vacation, a sick leave replacement. The nice thing about Strandschicht is that the whole thing is the responsibility of Strandschicht. And if my assistant goes on vacation, he writes to me a few weeks in advance from then until I go on vacation. A replacement is organized. If there are topics that I need to work on again specifically, then you can have the appointments here before and after. That works.

Further development of assistance

Yes, number two is also to say, please develop the assistants accordingly. I often find, especially in top management, that the assistants are sometimes really fitter than the managers. Unfortunately, this potential is not always used.

So develop these assistants further, take away their fears and the best job security is through further development. This means, for example, providing your assistants with further training in the area of AI, for example, and very, very importantly in the area of Microsoft 365. But this also includes clarity, if you have someone, an assistant, that applies to me for every employee who says, I don’t want to develop here, sorry, then I have no sympathy to say, if you don’t move with the times, you move with the times. So that really is always the issue. I’m tough as nails when I say that, as a manager, I have a clear responsibility to develop employees, to give employees every opportunity to develop. That is the manager’s job. It is also the employees’ job to accept this. And if someone doesn’t want to develop further, then at some point they will simply be left behind. And then, to be honest, I have no sympathy when someone says, okay, I’ve lost my job. So if you don’t move with the times, you move with the times.

Yes, then also to say, and for me this is always the topic of office kaizen by Jürgen Kurz and Jörg Knoblauch, to transfer the production principles to the office world, I think this is an extremely good approach. I say, if we worked in production the way we do in the office, we would never finish a car. So nobody would have the idea, when it goes Bing, to quickly run back from the line to the white office, then back to the assembly line and back to Bing again, when the next mail comes back to the office. Then nothing would ever get done. And against this background, it’s a good idea to simply take a look at production principles and really optimize, optimize, optimize an assistant. So, as I said, my absolute favorite VPA tip is Strandschicht. I’m very happy with it, I don’t get any commission from this podcast, but as I said, I can highly recommend it. Brickworks and Get My Friday are the services that Timothy Ferres recommended in his book “The Four-Hour Workweek”. I also worked with them. The problem was that they didn’t have a German-language service. And I can speak English well, but I often need materials in German or communication in German. So always with that in mind. It is important that when you work with the assistant, you have a common platform for appointments, e-mails, travel, charts, files, project overviews, tasks and notes. So that really means that you send as few emails back and forth as possible. I’m a big fan of Microsoft 365, of Teams, of OneNote and one service I love is Tripit. The idea of Tripit is that you set up an account there and when a travel confirmation is forwarded from your email to Tripit, it is automatically entered into a calendar that you can subscribe to again in your Outlook or Apple calendar or on your mobile devices. And the great thing is that the assistant can then email the travel confirmation to you. That’s how we do it with my assistant. And then I have it automatically entered in my calendar. So there really is a tripit, a wonderful idea that is really great.

Automation and assistance

Perhaps a few more ideas on the subject of automation, including with the assistant. Firstly, Get my Invoice has been a game changer for me when it comes to accounting preparation. Because the idea is that I have eight pages of Master Card statements every month and a lot of small stuff, with Amazon and Apple receipts. And here, once you have stored the access data, the platform automatically pulls all the receipts from these platforms and automatically sends them to your tax advisor via the DATEV interface. This means that you no longer have to sort or search for any documents. So this whole issue is an extreme automation lever.

Yes, it may also be interesting for companies that are somewhat larger and have large cash discount losses, as we had at Tchibo at the time. The idea is that you can say very nicely who signs factually free, who signs arithmetically free, who is there from certain amounts if necessary, it is automatically forwarded. This means that you don’t lose any discount income due to internal terms in this area. So it’s not worth it if you’re a one-man operation, but if you’re like Tchibo, for example, we’ve certainly had six-seven-figure cash discount losses per year.

Zapier

Yes, then Zapier is another great idea. In other words, the idea is that if you have systems that ideally have interfaces to others and not every system has an interface to another, then the idea of Zapier is that you have a data hub. In other words, Zapier offers an interface to many systems. Then you can practically say that if one system has a Zapier interface and another one does too, then the two can usually communicate with each other. For example, if someone subscribes to my newsletter, they are automatically added to my CRM system via Zapier.

Conclusion

So again, things where you can take the pressure off the assistant. It’s the same with emails. My assistant processes my emails. But of course I have a lot of Outlook rules that pre-sort things like newsletters. So you also use the combination. We’ll get to that in the last chapter, between human and artificial intelligence. And exactly in that order, because as you know, first switch on the brain, then the technology. With this in mind, I look forward to seeing you again next week when we look at the next chapter 6, namely the topic “Make the most of your video conferences”.

See you then. Good luck.

Your personal IT coach for managers, Thorsten Jekel.

Also available in: Deutsch

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