The work of executive and administrative assistants is filled with many small tasks throughout the day. These tasks are sometimes referred to as ‘shadow work’ and are creating challenges that impact focus, performance, and business cost.

New research commissioned by Perk reveals that shadow work costs businesses around $1.7 trillion (£1.26 trillion) each year as employees spend, on average, 7 hours a week on these tasks.

Luckily, the helping hand of technology can give you an advantage. From essential travel management tools to solutions to streamline your scheduling, taking advantage of the latest technology can help with virtually every element on your to-do list. In this article, we will reveal our recommendations for tools to add to your executive assistant toolbox, alongside Perk - the all-in-one platform for centralised travel and spend.

Best tools for meeting and scheduling

If your business has frequent work travellers, you might find it hard to keep up with who is where, for how long and their time difference.

These meeting and scheduling tools are some of the best to make sure that managers and assistants can streamline their planning and book meetings that fit everyone’s schedule, wherever they are.

Calendly

Say goodbye to sending endless back-and-forth emails with this online appointment scheduling tool.

Whether you are booking in an all-hands meeting for your boss, or organising a company retreat for your sales team. Calendly streamlines your planning process with automated responses.

Top features

• Your colleagues can sync Calendly to their own calendar or update their available hours on the platform directly. 

• Make sure your teammates never miss a meeting with automated reminders.

• Organising for employees across the globe? Calendly automatically syncs to attendees’ different time zones.

Clockwise

Clockwise is a time-saving online assistant that optimises your calendar, which means you can skip spending hours juggling everyone’s schedule.

This tool analyses your coworkers’ calendars to ensure meetings are booked at the most convenient time for all attendees, especially for those working remotely overseas.

Top features

• Clockwise lets you pre-set an automatic buffer of your choosing on either side of meetings to help avoid back-to-back meetings and events.

• Automatically accepts, changes, or declines meetings in line with your needs. Allowing you to focus on your work without interruptions.

• If a participant needs to prioritise something else in their schedule, Clockwise adjusts meeting times dynamically based on everyone's availability.

SavvyCal

SavvyCal lets you overlay your availability on top of your colleagues’ or clients’ calendars so that you can quickly identify the optimal meeting time.

Whether you're arranging a one-on-one or a group event, SavvyCal takes the stress out of scheduling calls.

Top features

• Establish parameters so your boss or team is not overwhelmed by back-to-back meetings.

• Create personalised booking links and host them on a custom domain to offer a sleek, professional experience.

• Set preferred time slots to encourage invitees to book the appointments that suit you or your C-Level the best.

Superhuman

Employees are checking emails at work an average of 121 times every day, taking up 28% of the working week. So, if you have a chaotic and overflowing inbox, it could take even longer and be very stressful. 

Slick email management app Superhuman intuitively organises your emails and automates your administrative tasks, saving users an average of four hours per week. Watch your productivity improve with a user-friendly tool that enables you to manage and respond to emails in half the time.

Top features

• Automatically filters your emails into categories according to their level of importance, so you can easily prioritise your inbox.

• Share a live view of an email with colleagues instead of having to keep forwarding it or cc them to add comments.

• AI suggests context-aware replies in your voice to help banish writer’s block and speed up responding to common requests.

Best tools for travel and expense management

If you are a work traveller who has just come back from a successful client meeting in the US, before you can even begin to think about the next steps, there are little jobs that get in the way - like logging all your expenses, something that 17% of people cite as their biggest frustration. 

These travel and expense management tools and platforms take the stress out of this, and can even oversee business expenses from another country.

Perk

Perk is an all-in-one platform designed to take the stress out of travelling for work.

With this easy-to-use online tool, you can plan, book, manage, and generate reports for your organisation’s work travel. For executive assistants responsible for getting their C-Level or coworkers from A to B, Perk can optimise many of the work travel’s challenging processes.

Top features

• With an extensive inventory, employees can book flights, hotels, trains, rental cars, and other transportation all on one platform with no need to pay up front.

• Need to make last-minute changes? Adjust arrangements in just a few clicks.

• Balancing company budgets and traveller preferences can be tough. Perk allows you to integrate your company's travel policies into the booking process so coworkers can choose from pre-approved options.

• Wave goodbye to chasing receipts. Consolidate invoices and generate travel spending reports in seconds with easy-to-use mobile and desktop dashboards.

Book, organise and control your business travel, all in one place.

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Payhawk

Are international payments causing constant headaches for your company? Payhawk is a spend management platform designed for multinational organisations to seamlessly oversee business expenses across borders. Payhawk lets you integrate with your accounting software so you can track expenses in real-time and get more comprehensive insights into business spending.

Top features

• Create hierarchies and automate the approval process to eliminate manual errors and put your time to better use.

• Gone are the days of chasing team members for receipts; Payhawk sends automatic reminders or can make it mandatory for staff to attach them when submitting reimbursement requests.

• International spending made simple. Payhawk users can spend on company credit and debit cards in over 30 countries and seven currencies.

Spendesk

Spendesk is your one-stop shop for efficiently controlling and tracking expenses.

Manage invoices and company spending with minimal effort. Through Spendesk’s automated accounting processes, you can reduce your workload and make the finance team your biggest fan.

Top features

• Make purchasing more secure by issuing virtual and physical cards for staff spending and paying for services and subscriptions.

• Set up automatic spending limits and expense approvals to help keep employees policy-compliant.

• You don’t need to be in the dark. Monitor transactions in real-time for immediate insight into team spending to ensure you’re on track with company budgets.

Best tools for sharing travel policies easily

Employees attend an average of 62 meetings every month, with nearly half of these meetings deemed unproductive, amounting to a lot of time wasted.

Utilising tools that can help you share information, such as travel policies, easily and quickly, will help reduce unnecessary meetings.

Loom

When using Loom, assistants can use the Chrome extension, desktop, or mobile app to record and edit a message before sharing information effortlessly and reducing unnecessary meetings. Whether it’s a walkthrough of your boss’s latest travel itinerary or a screen share of how to use the latest company software, Loom is an invaluable tool, particularly for remote-first teams.

Top features

• Capture your screen, camera, or both to explain ideas, give product walkthroughs, provide feedback, or deliver updates.

• Add your company's branding to videos and embed CTA links so viewers can easily contact you or access more information.

• Track viewer analytics, including who has watched your video and how much they've engaged with it, and sync with your CRM to follow up effectively.

Notion

Tired of working across several apps? Notion is a comprehensive workspace that combines notes, databases, task management, and collaboration tools.

Perfect for executive assistants, Notion lets you create to-do lists, manage documents, organise team projects, and more, all in one place.

Top features

• Customise pages, databases, and task boards to create a workflow that suits your needs.

• Collaborate with your team by tagging coworkers in the comments of your notes so they receive an instant notification for time-sensitive tasks.

• Connect Notion with other apps like Google Drive, Jira, and Trello to centralise your workflow and optimise productivity.

Miro

Wish you could find a quicker and more engaging way to kick off your latest project? Miro is an AI-powered platform that brings teams together to generate ideas, plan projects, and solve problems creatively.

It's a visual workspace with eye-catching features designed to inspire your team and streamline workflows.

Top features

• Work simultaneously with colleagues using Intelligent Canvas, a virtual whiteboard with space to add sticky notes, diagrams, text, and other visual elements.

• Let Miro AI save you significant time by turning your mind maps and ideas into summaries, briefs, diagrams, and interactive prototypes.

• Kick-start your projects with ready-made templates in various formats, such as mapping and diagramming or strategy and planning.

Fellow

Make the most out of your meet-ups with Fellow. A tool that aims to help organisations get the most out of their meetings.

From making agenda creation more interactive to automating task assignments. Fellow automates the tedious, manual tasks of organising meetings and ensures your coworkers’ gatherings are efficient and outcome-driven.

Top features

• Create meeting agendas with your participants, allowing everyone to contribute and stay up to speed ahead of time.

• Record the meetings and produce a transcription in just a few clicks. With Fellow, you can share these documents and assign action items for participants to follow up on.

• Fellow integrates with over 50 tools, including calendars, task managers, and video conferencing software, to seamlessly manage every aspect of your meeting.

Additional useful tools for growing businesses

Project and task management

As your business scales, you are probably seeing the task list expand and become harder to keep tabs on. These project management tools will help executive assistants stay on track and even automate some task assignments.

Automation and AI

Admin tasks take up more than a third of office workers’ daily time, so why not use AI and automation tools to help with some of these? Tasks such as meeting note-taking and spell-checking can all be taken care of with the following tools.

Productivity for the team

Businesses thrive when employees are productive, and these tools will help executive assistants keep their teams on track and logging the correct time on projects.

How Perk can help executive assistants manage everything

Executive assistants and travel managers face a daily mountain of admin. While the tools and platforms listed in this guide will help speed them up, Perk can go even further by solving the administrative challenge that is travel booking for work.

Perk speeds up the entire travel management process by consolidating your most time-consuming tasks into one simple dashboard to book flights, hotels, trains, and rental cars. The real time-saver? It also automatically manages traveller preferences, expenses, and company policies. You get the job done faster, and your travellers get a trip that works for them. 

Make booking work travel trips easy with Perk. Sign up today for a free demo.