The Executive Assistant’s Streamlined Communication Guide

An executive assistant has always been fundamental in keeping an organization running. But as the way we do business changes, executive assistant duties and responsibilities change too. From the days of sticky notes and written calendars to the prevalence of cloud-based management tools today — EAs need a diverse set of skills and tools to adapt to the shifting requirements of the executive.

The modern-day EA must support today’s in-demand leaders while ensuring efficient communications across a dispersed workforce, leading to a unique set of tasks. An executive assistant’s responsibilities include:

• Answering phone calls
• Scheduling meetings and appointments
• Handling bookkeeping tasks, such as maintaining corporate records, documents, and reports
• Using word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software, as well as cloud-based collaboration and management solutions
• Preparing for meetings, take meeting notes
• Greeting and welcoming visitors
• Planning and arranging travel

Executive assistants have to go beyond understanding technology, they need to use these solutions to optimize the way their organization operates. For the executive assistants using the Zoom platform, this guide offers tips and tricks on how to use Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Team Chat to elevate the way you communicate and collaborate.

With leaders having busy and complicated schedules, executive assistants are tasked with managing their time in a thoughtful and strategic way. This requires agile technology that streamlines the scheduling process and makes the most out of meetings.

Follow these eight Zoom Meetings tips to improve your approach to managing and scheduling meetings:

Your PMI is an assigned, permanent meeting ID that does not change and is just for you. There’s also a personal link that’s associated with your Personal Meeting ID. You can send this personal link when you want to make a quick internal call.

With the Zoom desktop client, an application for your desktop, you can view a quick snapshot of your meetings for the day or week — any Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars on your integrated calendar will be reflected under the Meetings tab. With the Zoom desktop client meeting view, you can easily locate your next call and quickly join with the click of a button.

Rather than scheduling meetings on your own Zoom account and giving your exec co-host privileges, you can schedule directly from their Zoom account. Just ask your executive to go into their Zoom Meeting settings, head to “Other” and then locate the “Schedule Privileges” section. From there, they can give you access to schedule on their behalf, so they can still own the meeting invite without having to do any of the heavy lifting on the back end.

If you want to create a calendar invite over Outlook or Google Calendar, you can quickly add a Zoom Meeting link to the body of the invite through the Outlook plugin or GSuite add-on.

Head to the security section of your Zoom settings to enable key security features designed to safeguard your communications. Be sure to toggle on the Waiting Room — which is a feature you can tailor to create a unique greeting message for guests — as well as turn on “Require a passcode when scheduling new meetings.” This can add an extra layer of security to your meetings, helping to create an environment that only the intended attendees can join.

Under Meetings settings, jump to the “Email Notification” section where you can toggle on and off certain notification options that help create a paper trail of actions taken in the meeting. You can choose to notify the host when a cloud recording is available, when attendees join a meeting before the host, if an alternative host is set or removed from a meeting, and more.

If you need to record your meeting for later use or to circulate with attendees, use the cloud recording option — which is a feature for paid subscribers — so that the host can easily send the recording out after the meeting. The local recording option should only be used if the host wants to keep the file exclusive to their device. Co-hosts won’t receive the recording either, so be sure to keep that in mind when scheduling the meeting from a certain Zoom account.

You can tailor in-meeting settings as a host and co-host to create the type of collaborative session you need. You can select who can share their screens, annotate, and more to make sure the right people are able to share the right information during the call.

Zoom Team Chat comes included with your Zoom license and is an efficient way to quickly communicate with people in or out of your organization. Executive assistants can strategically leverage Zoom Team Chat within the Zoom desktop client or mobile app to keep track of key contacts, take diligent notes, and stay agile, no matter where they are.

Here are a few key tips for using Zoom Team Chat to stay on top of your day-to-day:

To keep a productive workflow, use the Chat section of the Zoom client to “star” certain users or group chat channels you need quick access to, which could be fellow leaders or direct reports to your executive. This action will move them to the top of chat under “Starred.” Any “Starred” contact or chat channel will show up in alphabetical order on the left side. If someone sends an important message that you want to save, you can also “star” that individual comment — look for it under “Starred Messages.”

Zoom Team Chat offers a Personal Space, which is listed as your name under the “Starred” section of the contacts panel and operates as your own unique chat. You can use this space to take notes, create a to-do list, or just remember something for later. You can go back in later and delete or edit notes, “star” a message, or take screenshots.

If your admin allows it, you can even add people from outside your organization to your contacts in Zoom Team Chat. Just click the “plus” icon in the top left of the contacts page, click “Invite a Zoom Contact,” enter their email, and they will receive a notification to accept. You can seamlessly collaborate across organizations, easily chatting with others to coordinate and exchange information.

With Zoom’s cloud phone system, you can avoid the limitations of a traditional desk phone and make calls from your mobile device, desktop, laptop — even an iPad or tablet. Natively built for the Zoom platform, Zoom Phone enables executive assistants to elevate phone calls to a meeting for easy collaboration, delegate calls for a quick handoff to a leader, and more.

Here are four important tips for using Zoom Phone to modernize your calls:

With Zoom Phone, your desk phone lives on a device of your choosing, reducing any previous limitations to remote administrative work and creating a seamless support structure. With the call delegation feature, also known as shared line appearance, you can easily transfer calls to your executive or assign the call to other team members to handle on busier days. You can also assign multiple phone numbers to a single user, provide call coverage/delegation for others, park a call and retrieve it from another device or user, and more. Whether you’re on the go or out of office, you have a flexible structure that ensures no calls go unanswered.

As a softphone offering, Zoom Phone helps streamline the way you keep track of your communications. You can transcribe voicemails, which includes IVR overflow and call queue voicemails, to easily transform important messages from a voicemail into a quick email to your executive. In addition to voice communication, Zoom Phone provides text messaging (SMS). When communicating with others is best delivered as a text message, Zoom Phone has you covered.

You don’t have to be glued to your desk to field any necessary communications — with Zoom Phone you can configure business hours and update call routing to make sure any incoming calls are addressed properly. With updated call routing, you can tailor settings to create rules for calls not answered, make sure calls are forwarded automatically, have a call ring on all Zoom applications, and more.

As an add-on to Zoom Phone, the Zoom Phone Power Pack offers a sleek desktop experience with a persistent awareness panel that helps EAs handle consistent call velocity and transfer calls within their teams. It also comes with real-time and historical call queue analytics that provide powerful insights to help optimize customer and employee interactions.

Executive assistants don’t have time to work across disparate collaboration applications — they need a seamless solution that makes communicating easy. Consolidating your communications with Zoom streamlines workflows and simplifies collaboration, preparing executive assistants for any new task that may come their way. By using Zoom Meetings, Chat, and Phone as a unified communication and management tool, EAs elevate the way they work and improve the support they offer to executives.

By maximizing the potential of the Zoom platform, EAs can foster increased productivity, happier executives, and more meaningful work. They pave the way for everyone to get more done, together.