Companies look for ways to do more with fewer resources, regardless of whether the economy is strong or weak. During periods of rapid growth, hiring becomes challenging; during tough times, cost-cutting is necessary.
HR leaders, chiefs of staff, operations managers, and others who support executives’ administrative needs are turning to outsourced executive assistants to reduce costs and improve organizational productivity simultaneously.
To address the gap, more business leaders are seeking long-term outsourced executive support through managed outsourced executive assistant (virtual assistant) services.
Even professionals overseeing admin services at Fortune 500 firms are experiencing these benefits. This change is propelled by five key trends, and this guide will introduce you to each of them!
If your executives are bogged down in day-to-day tasks and need more time for strategic business-building, this guide can help you determine whether a managed virtual assistant service is the right solution for long-term administrative support.
What is an Outsourced Executive Assistant Service?
A managed outsourced executive assistant service can hire executive assistants without adding management or HR overhead, reducing overhead.
Many virtual assistant services act as staffing agencies, connecting you with freelancers or independent contractors. However, when you hire an independent contractor, you are responsible for training, managing, and supervising the assistant’s work. The assistants you're outsourcing aren't full-time employees of the agency.
With a managed remote executive assistant service, you hire a company, not a group of individuals, one at a time. Instead of a single point of failure, you get a system designed for your success.
The service provider:
- Hires
- Trains
- Manages and QAs all work
- Coaches
- Pays and provides benefits
- Provides career development
In this case, the outsourced administrative support is provided by a virtual assistant backed by a team. The VAs are all full-time employees, and the company offers a career path, growth opportunities, and incentives to optimize performance. But to you, they are just like internal employees, embedded in your organization and working directly with your executives.
Learn more: 26 Virtual Assistant Tasks You Can Outsource
5 Reasons Businesses are Turning to Managed Executive Assistant Services for Teams
- Improve Executive Productivity (and Wellness)
- Executive Assistants are Hard to Find
- Scalability
- Lower Costs
- Expert Support and Management
1. Improve Executive Productivity (and Wellness)
All the productivity tools and technology designed to make executives more self-reliant have actually made it harder to find human administrators (more on that later). Since 2004, the number of professional admins in the U.S. has dropped by 65% percent.
Email, voicemail, chat, calendar apps, travel planning apps, and expense account apps require significant time to use. According to ServiceNow research, they consume 16 hours per week. Companies that pay their executives to handle administrative tasks realize this is not a wise business decision.
Prialto’s 2024 Productivity Report found that 43 percent of executives list "administrative tasks" as the biggest drag on their productivity, and 52 percent listed "stress and overwhelm" as their primary blocker.
Leadership IQ found that 67 percent of executives have been less productive due to burnout, and 65 percent admit they have made mistakes as a result. Just 35 percent said they are mentally thriving.
Outsourced executive assistants offer a budget-friendly way to relieve executives of administrative tasks. Managed services simplify the process for companies to offer this assistance. HR departments are freed from the responsibilities of recruiting, hiring, training, paying, and supervising assistants, as the service provider manages all these aspects. Executives can then shift their focus to strategic work, reclaiming those 16 hours a week with the help of a skilled professional.
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2. Executive Assistants are Hard to Find
As mentioned, the pool of U.S. executive assistants is shrinking.
From 2000 to 2019, the U.S. economy shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs, mostly due to technology. The shortage of executive assistants is particularly challenging for businesses with larger executive teams that need to quickly scale up support.
According to LinkedIn, the tight labor market and surging demand mean hiring an administrative assistant takes 33 days. If you extend that time to multiple executives, you have a daunting challenge.
Outsourced administrative assistant services emerged to match U.S. businesses with offshore markets where talent is plentiful. However, someone still must interview, onboard, train, and manage the VAs' performance. Doing this one at a time is also time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Global workforce consultancy Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA) released its updated assessment of the outsourced assistant marketplace in 2022. The Virtual Assistant Landscape report highlighted why businesses prefer the managed service approach.
“The more sophisticated and highly developed VA firms offer a managed service where assistants are supervised locally, the quality of work checked, and regular training and development offered,” SIA said. This contrasts to a self-serve model, which is more akin to a platform that simply facilitates the introduction of a client to an assistant and does not provide ongoing support throughout the engagement.”
Firms hiring assistants through a self-serve platform will have to take care of their own training requirements and generally manage their own quality standards,” SAI said.
Outsourced executive assistant services include backup assistants and managers working behind the scenes to maintain continuity. A trained backup ensures availability if the primary assistant is absent. Since new and backup assistants are regularly trained and deployed, service providers maintain a “bench” of experienced staff ready to step into leadership roles. Companies can often hire these services within just a week.
Learn more: 2025 Outsourcing Statistics and Trends
3. Scalability
Outsourcing admin work one at a time, remotely or in person, is hard to scale effectively.
Hiring assistants one by one is inefficient, expensive, and risky when supporting a team of executives. Even with a freelance agency providing VAs, you'll still need extra management resources to onboard, train, and oversee them.
Also, if the COVID crisis has taught us anything, it is the importance of workforce flexibility. When shutdowns were announced, companies went remote within days.
- Employees created home offices with or without extra space.
- Companies delivered laptops, webcams, and headsets.
- All meetings went online.
- Millions of employees were laid off.
Now, companies are struggling to scale back up. However, with ongoing economic uncertainty, hiring full-time employees still feels risky.
Service providers hire, train, and supervise outsourced administrative support staff. There is no management on the client's side. Because the service provider has hundreds of assistants available, businesses can quickly scale their administrative layer without additional HR or management resources and without the long-term commitment of full-time workers. Trained backup assistants, performance managers, and account managers are available to ensure continuity and quality control.
You can scale up and scale back as business conditions change.
“Employment can be burdensome,” SIA said. “Managed executive assistant firms offer their clients the ability to upscale or downscale efficiently in reaction to unexpected changes in business demand.”
Administrative tasks are not core to most businesses. Offloading functions such as calendar and inbox management, travel planning, expense accounts, data entry, and document preparation enables executives to move the company forward.
Offloading these tasks to an outsourced assistant service boosts operational efficiency by reducing management and HR overhead. Additionally, a managed service offers levels of organizational flexibility that are much harder to achieve with direct hires or independent contractors.
Related: How to Gain Leverage with Prialto's Virtual Assistants
4. Lower Costs
“There are several reasons why organizations take advantage of remote assistants, and they mostly mirror the reasons why organizations might opt to outsource more generally,” SIA said. “Of course, a driver of any productivity enhancement is to lower costs.”
According to Glassdoor, the average salary for an executive assistant in the U.S. is $72,000 annually, or about $38 per hour.
That's only the base salary. Generally, the benefits for a full-time employee increase the company's expenses by an additional 25 percent. According to SIA, outsourced admin support from regions with lower labor costs is often employed part-time.
The expenses related to recruiting, hiring, training, and managing employees also encompass overhead costs for HR and executives, with each executive typically overseeing their assistants.
A managed service requires no HR or management overhead. The provider handles salaries, benefits, and performance management.
A managed outsourced executive assistant service starts at about $25 per hour for offshore VAs. All training, HR, benefits, backup support, and performance management are included in that price.
Then there is the cost of office space. It costs about $11,000 per year per employee to provide office space. The service provider bears this cost. In the managed service model, the VAs are not independent contractors working from home; they work in secure facilities with company-owned computers and networks.
“Transitioning roles from a wage to an outsourced hourly basis means that you can carve out precisely the support you need at a price you can afford,” SIA said. Clients can save money on training and other employee benefits, payroll processing, and desk space (potentially lowering office rents).”
5. Expert Support and Management
The fifth reason businesses are returning to managed outsourced executive assistant services is to leverage the administrative expertise they do not have internally on the service and management sides.
SIA identifies “Tapping into third-party expertise” as a key driver for remote assistant services. Outsourced assistant companies focus on providing skilled workers in particular areas, and organizations that use these services wisely can achieve a competitive edge.
A managed service provides businesses with trained executive assistants who are already familiar with their systems and tools, enabling them to start working immediately. These assistants work in cohorts, so when a new app or technology is introduced, they can promptly find a peer who is already experienced and can share knowledge, reducing the learning curve.
“Remote assistant firms are remote work experts first,” SIA said. “With onsite work restricted, organizations having to source remote administrative support might prefer to use suppliers with well-established processes, technology, quality standards and protocols for remote work.”
However, it is not just about the executive assistants' individual and collective expertise. The built-in performance management and service optimization are equally valuable.
Executive assistants do not traditionally have a career path, and most companies do not have personnel trained to manage and support teams of administrative assistants.
With a managed, outsourced executive assistant service, you get experienced managers who know how to build processes and workflows to make the service as efficient as possible. The managers also coach assistants and provide quality control of their work.
The management layer improves service performance and assistant retention. In a managed service, assistants have opportunities for career growth. They can become mentors, managers, and trainers, and they can also move into operational roles such as recruiting, HR, and IT.
VAs tend to remain at companies offering growth opportunities, particularly in areas where such opportunities are limited.
“The remote executive assistant market was in robust health before the onset of the global pandemic,” SIA said. “As COVID-19 swept across the world in Q1 2020, firms took an initial hit to demand, especially among SME customers, but growth for many is now back to pre-COVID levels, if not higher.”
COVID also sparked a drive for efficiency and digitization across organizations, and businesses created digital versions of themselves and offloaded more non-core work than ever.
Learn more: The Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant
The Bottom Line
McKinsey analysts observed that the pandemic prompted companies to reconsider how they handle G&A tasks that are not central to their business. As a result, managed and outsourced executive assistant services are becoming more appealing to larger firms aiming to optimize their administrative operations and reduce expenses on roles that do not directly generate revenue.
Outsourcing organizational administration to expert teams makes economic and operational sense.
Looking to outsource your team's admin roles? Book a call today and learn how you can save both costs and headaches with Prialto.