Digital workflow optimisation sounds like something that belongs to an operations team with a whiteboard and a stack of process diagrams, but for an EA, it is really just the work of making the way things get done less painful and less reliant on you holding it all in your head. Think about the last meeting you set up for your Executive. The request to arrange it landed in your inbox. The document everyone needed was saved somewhere on the shared drive, under a name you had to guess. And the real context, what people actually wanted out of it, had already been half-discussed in a Slack thread you happened to be copied into. None of it lived in the same place, and you were the one pulling it together, on top of two other jobs. That is normal for most of us. And let’s be honest about what it really is: there is no system here, just you, being very good at remembering things.
That is the gap digital workflow optimisation is there to close. It is frustrating because most EAs are running more tools than they ever have, across more channels than they ever have, and nobody sat any of us down and showed us how to make those tools actually talk to each other. It isn’t in the job description; it’s hard to figure out, and when you do try to structure some of this stuff, you’re more than likely to face some kickback from your colleagues. So it tends to stay in your head, where it depends entirely on you turning up and remembering the order of things.
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It helps to be clear about what digital workflow optimisation really is, because it is easy to picture something far grander and more technical than it needs to be. At its simplest, it means looking at a process you run regularly, seeing how the work actually moves from one step to the next, and then taking out whatever makes it slower or more fragile than it should be. Take expense approvals, or get a monthly report signed off. Each one is a chain of small steps and handoffs, created by accident rather than by design.
The thing worth noticing is the difference between how a process is supposed to work and how it really works. For example, on paper, a report goes from the analyst to your Executive for sign-off and out to the board. In reality, you chase the analyst twice, reformat the figures because they never come in the right template, hold it while your Executive is travelling, and forward it the moment they land. None of that extra labour shows up anywhere except in your week. Digital workflow optimisation is the practice of seeing the hidden labour clearly and deliberately deciding which parts you look after and which you can hand over to a digital workflow.
This has always been part of the job, but for many EAs, digital workflow optimisation is becoming an increasingly important part of it. Not every office is the same. Some are tidy, with a couple of well-chosen tools that mostly behave themselves. Plenty of others have picked up a new app every time a team decided the last one wasn’t quite right, and didn’t switch the old one off. But whichever one yours looks like, the volume is the thing worth noting. There is simply more coming at you than there was a few years ago, both in the information arriving through every channel and in the sheer amount of work landing on your desk. Someone has to make all of it hold together, and more often than not, that someone is you, doing it by hand.
That work is relentless. You are the one copying the decision from the meeting into the tracker, then re-sending the file because it went into the wrong thread. It is real work, and it eats real hours that keep growing every time another task lands on your desk. This is exactly where digital workflow optimisation comes in, because the busier and more scattered the office gets, the more value there is in the person who can make it run as one joined-up thing rather than a dozen separate ones.
You can’t improve a process you haven’t properly examined, so the first step is to map it. Pick something that matters but won’t cause a disaster if your first attempt is rough; employee onboarding or expense approvals are good candidates, and then follow a single real request through to completion. What starts it off? Who does it go to next? What do they need before they can act? Where are the bottlenecks? It helps to be specific because it is easy to write something like “the manager reviews it,” but that part of the process usually involves a few separate checks, and each one is a place where the whole thing can slow down.
Pay particular attention to the handoffs when you are looking at digital workflow optimisation, the moments where work passes from one person or system to the next, because that is where most of the delay happens and where some of the context or important information gets lost. Then measure it roughly before you touch anything: how long does this normally take, and where does it spend most of that time just waiting? You don’t need anything fancy; even a rough sense of “this takes four days, and three of them are just waiting for one person” tells you where the real problem is. Good digital workflow optimisation starts with that kind of plain observation, not jumping straight in with buying software.
The temptation, once you can see the whole process, is to reach straight for a tool that will automate it. Resist that for a moment. You will find that many workflows in your team or organisation have steps that stopped serving their purpose years ago, such as an approval step that nobody completes or a cc list full of people who have left the business. This is the place ot start – cut those out first. Automating a wasteful step just means you get the waste faster, so tidy up what is there before you do anything else.
Then automate the dull, repeatable parts that really don’t need you, for example, this could be status updates that you do manually on a project tool, or a routine approval that meets the same simple criteria every single time and doesn’t require your Executive to sign it off (vacation requests come to mind). The aim is to take yourself out of the parts that never needed your discernment, not out of the process itself, so the hours you save are spent on much more interesting work. That is the whole point of digital workflow optimisation for an Assistant: your attention ends up on work that actually changes outcomes, rather than the busywork around it.
It is also worth noting that this is among the most strategic, undervalued work an EA does, and you should make sure it is seen as such. When you fix a broken process and can show that a sign-off that used to take four days now takes one, you are building a clear case for your own value, and that is a case worth making out loud. The work does not speak for itself, so name what you fixed, show the hours it gave back, and ask for the tools or the time to fix the next one.
A process that only works when you are alert and on top of everything is really just you, working hard, with some extra steps bolted on and called a system. The real test of digital workflow optimisation is whether the workflow keeps running when you are stretched thin or away altogether. That means writing it down somewhere someone else can actually follow it and keeping the decision rules simple enough that they can run it without you being there.
Expect to get it slightly wrong the first time, because everyone does, and build in a moment to review and adjust once it has been running for a few weeks. You might find extra parts of the process you couldn’t see at the start. Steps in a workflow tend to become more obvious once real work has flowed through it, and a small retweak then is worth far more than trying to design the perfect version on the first go. Done this way, digital workflow optimisation stops being a one-off tidy-up and becomes something you do a little at a time but continuously.
Every process you fix is a small win that keeps paying you back, long after you have forgotten you fixed it. Sort out a process that used to take a week, and you save those days every time it runs from then on, not just once. That kind of return is what makes digital workflow optimisation worth the effort, because it saves far more time than if you just tried to get faster at what you do yourself.
An EA has never been measured by how many tasks they get through, but by how well the work runs around them. Get the systems right, and you spend less of your life as the human glue between a dozen apps and more of it on the work only you can do. That is what good digital workflow optimisation actually buys you.
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