Your executives are burning out, and they are not telling anyone.
A 2021 study by Leadership IQ found that 67 percent of executives felt burned out.
And 75 percent told Capitalise they hide their stress from their companies.
Executives will report anonymously that they are burning out, but they won’t let their own HR departments or coworkers know.
HR news site TLNT bemoans the situation, calling executive burnout: “a problem no one talks about.”
Now is the time to break the silence and get your executives the support they need. To do that, though, you first need to understand what causes executive stress and burnout.
Why are executives burning out? Here are a couple of clues from our latest Executive Productivity Reports. Trends indicate that your executives are overwhelmed with administrative tasks and struggling to get enough sleep.
Here is how many executives reported feeling overwhelmed by administrative tasks.
Executives said they spend four to five hours a day on busy work, such as email, scheduling meetings, and file management.
Here is how many executives got the recommended six to nine hours of sleep:
Sleep loss and burnout are intricately linked. "Insufficient sleep predicts clinical burnout," said the Journal Occupational Health Psychology.
To help your executives prevent burnout and enhance their wellness, you can start by providing them with more administrative support. For generations, executives had assistants who were the gatekeepers of their time and attention.
Today, though, traditional executive support is hard to find. The ranks of administrative assistants are shrinking while the number of executive-level jobs is growing. There are slightly more than half as many administrators in the workforce as in 2000, while the economy generates approximately a quarter of a million executive jobs every year.
The constant pings of message alerts that once went to traditional assistants now go directly to their screens, and they have no one to delegate to.
You can use virtual executive assistants to do most of the work of a traditional admin and give your execs more time for deep work and deep sleep. Remote assistants can’t make coffee, but they can help with:
If you think the virtual assistant is a fad for freelancers and solopreneurs, you’re partially correct. It started that way when Tim Ferris taught the world how to use virtual assistants to run a solo business while working just four hours per week. But the virtual executive assistant market is maturing and growing fast—rising 41 percent in 2020. Companies are turning to managed virtual executive assistant service providers as a staffing model to provide professional administrative support for executive teams.
At Prialto, we see executive stress every day as staffing and HR teams come to us to offload executive administrative tasks. Allocating a few hours every day for deep work and personal time can be life-changing for executive teams and HR professionals.
Here is how a virtual assistant helped Clark Morton, partner at insurance company Woodruff Sawyer, take back control of his calendar:
“I spent my days herding cats,” he said. “I might need to coordinate with two, three, four, or five people from Woodruff Sawyer and several people from the client-side. It was a huge time commitment and royal pain. Now I just let the Prialto assistants coordinate it all.”
In a managed service, virtual assistant service providers hire, train, and manage offshore executive assistants who take on the four to five hours of administrative tasks that overwhelm executives each day.
The beauty of the managed service model for you is that the service provider does the heavy lifting of training and quality control, as well as the back-office payroll, benefits, and compliance. This means you don’t have to be an expert in training and managing assistants, or incur any HR overhead.
The managed service model also means that your executives can receive the support they need in a matter of days, as the service provider has trained professional assistants ready to work. Seth Cohen, vice president at Castlight Health was worried that it would take too much of his and his team's time to get virtual assistants hired, onboarded, and up to speed.
“I initially expected the service to take substantial upfront time from me to get it working,” he said. “But Prialto’s service culture processes made it impressively turnkey".
The service provider also trains backup assistants to take over when an executive's primary assistant is unavailable due to illness or absence. The service can scale up as your executive suite grows. You never have to start over.
You can also use virtual assistants to augment your internal staff and expand support to more executives. Admins are hard to find, and you want to keep the ones you have from getting overwhelmed. Matt Paulson, Development Chief of Staff at CytomeX Therapeutics, had just that problem.
“Our internal executive assistants were overwhelmed. We had just four executive assistants supporting 20 executives,” he said. “Things were slipping through the cracks. We engaged Prialto to take on scheduling, travel, and expense management.”
Executives often avoid discussing stress and burnout. But you can get to the topic of time management and how to make room for strategic work, personal time, and sleep by asking what tasks they would love to delegate if given a chance.
You can bet that they will be eager to have that conversation. Providing executives with more time, in the form of administrative support, is one way to make their lives at work and at home more manageable. Explore this page to discover how a managed virtual assistant service can provide your team with the support it needs.