Before each board meeting, the CEO gets a pre-read built on the one decision the board is asked to make, with every figure from the company's own reports, an agenda kept mostly for discussion and the questions directors are likely to ask. Afterwards, a record of what was decided. The CEO sends it all.
Primary function: Executive and office support
The assistant hands the traveller one plan for one business trip: dates and nights fixed from the brief, travel and hotel options with prices and the day each was checked, a day-by-day timetable around the meetings, the cost against travel policy and the bookings still to make. Nothing is booked or paid.
Primary function: Executive and office support
Your chief of staff keeps one register of what the leadership actually approved, across every meeting and message: each decision with who approved it, each action with one owner and a date, what is overdue, and a flag wherever a new decision clashes with an earlier one or revives a rejected idea.
Primary function: Executive and office support
Every task a manager hands over goes with a clear brief: what to deliver, in what form, by what date and time, why it matters, who will use it, what the person may decide alone and when the manager will check in. Each week, one list shows what is open, what is late and the next note to send.
Primary function: Executive and office support
For candidates your team has already chosen to interview, the recruiting coordinator gets one scheduling sheet that lines up each candidate's offered times, in their own time zone, with the interviewers' free time, plus a ready confirmation or availability request for each. A person sends every message and invitation.
Primary function: Recruiting and hiring
Whoever runs the meeting walks in with an agenda where every topic has an outcome and a time, and walks out with a one-page record: what was decided, who owns each action and by when, and what is still open. Nothing reaches anyone until that person has read it and sends it.
Primary function: Executive and office support
Staff questions about leave, hours, expenses and conduct get answers that quote your own handbook, name the section, and say plainly where the handbook is silent. Anything about one person's own entitlement goes to HR, and no reply leaves until a person has read it.
Primary function: People and HR
An executive handed a pile of reports, articles or papers gets one brief: what each source found, where the sources agree and disagree, the limits of each, and exact quotations cited to the page. Built only from the documents supplied. What it means for the business stays the reader's call.
Primary function: Executive and office support
The owner of a document that came back from several reviewers gets one checklist: every proposed edit and comment, grouped by section, with clashes between reviewers set side by side. Every item stays open until the owner decides it, and the document itself is never touched.
Primary function: Executive and office support
Each month the office manager turns what teams send in into one staff newsletter, with answers to the questions people keep asking, each quoted from an approved source and its owner named. Nothing about one person's pay, health or performance goes in, and a person approves the issue before it goes.
Primary function: Executive and office support