Opinion: Adding value

Sharing your skills and helping others in the workplace is crucial to supporting a business as a whole. Declan Halton-Woodward, EA to CEO at Handelsbanken Wealth/Heartwood reveals why assistants should strive to add value wherever possible in such a changing industry.

We are a cost to our business. We don’t earn money and we don’t make money, unlike most other departments. Therefore, it is my belief that we have to add value wherever we can. I once heard that in order to justify our costs, we have to make our principal 30 per cent more productive. Most of us achieve that, by a country mile, but as our roles and our companies evolve, we must look for other ways to add value.

As executives, our managers have a broad-minded view of the business as a whole, and so should we. We must continually ask ourselves not what we can do for our principal, but what we can do for the wider business.

Say, for example, you have key skills in PowerPoint production, project management, or those dreaded pivot tables; can you teach those skills to other assistants or colleagues who may find them useful?

“Sometimes adding value means taking on duties outside our remit or lending a helping hand to other people around the office.”

Another area we can add value is cost savings; we see how many different teams and departments operate and spend money, through our work, relationship building and even through checking expenses. Not only can we use this knowledge to come up with cost-saving ideas, but we can take one department’s cost initiatives and advise on how this can be applied to other teams. Perhaps we can work our networks to find cheaper suppliers for many of our wider office’s stationery/consumables/services/events, (as if we needed another reason to prove networking is King in the assistant world).

As a result of our extensive knowledge of the business we may be able to recommend and/or enact policies or procedures that save time, increase morale and make it easier for the business and its employees to work. Sometimes adding value means taking on duties outside our remit or lending a helping hand to other people around the office.

We must be innovators – coming up with ideas to predict, solve and mitigate issues, as well as creating efficiencies to increase productivity. While not all our ideas will be viable, we are proving our worth.

To be a great assistant in this changing environment, we have to constantly ask ourselves, how can we add value here?