As business environment is rapidly evolving followed by worldwide globalization, many multinational companies and multi-national employees operating in more than one nation are easily seen in today’s businesses. These changes require smooth communic...
As business environment is rapidly evolving followed by worldwide globalization, many multinational companies and multi-national employees operating in more than one nation are easily seen in today’s businesses. These changes require smooth communication skills from executive assistants working in multinational companies in addition to simple assistance in given tasks. Good communication skill and how well one communicates in business environment became a critical key factor in differentiating highly qualified executive assistants amongst others.
This study is to analyze the current task-related communication landscape and its’ difficulties of executive assistants in multinational companies, mainly amongst their managers, peers, and co-workers. Also, this study is to suggest preferable communicational method to facilitate smooth working environment and more effective way of working based on the research conducted.
The research was conducted by focusing on an actual case study. An actual multinational company operating in Korea was selected and named as “A” corporation and the group of 20 currently employed executive assistances in “A” corporation were chosen as research sample. Data were collected by the method of survey responses. Survey was consisted of written questionnaires in an open response format, and individual work logs by survey correspondents were also used as references to back up survey responses. Consolidated data were inputted in MS-EXCEL and later sorted by different sheets based on “means of communication”. Deviation of responses by survey correspondents were matched with sorted sheets and actual cases were given to each identified category as examples.
Conclusions of this study are summarized as following.
First, tasks related to inter-personal communications take up large percentage of total tasks conducted by executive assistants working in multinational companies, higher than the average when compared to total tasks.
Secondly, communication with direct manager ranked first in the order of communication tasks frequency, followed by peer executive assistants, peer workers, and lastly external stakeholders. In terms of the means of communication, mixed communication was the most common communication method, followed by oral communication, written communication and non-linguistic communication.
Third, difficulties in communication were identified in (1) communication counterpart: manager, co-workers, peer executive assistants, and external stakeholder, (2) means of communication: oral communication, written communication, mixed communication, and non-linguistic communication.
Fourth, executive assistants working in multinational companies possess communication skills which can help overcoming obstacles around communicational problems they face in their tasks as executive assistants.
This study’s significances are as following.
First, this study seeks solutions for difficulties in communication at multinational work environment by focusing on an actual case of executive assistants in a multi-national company.
Second, based on the current study, further study utilizing larger research sample can strengthen the conclusion and can be the foundation of advanced researches.
Third, the findings of this study can be beneficial in developing trainings and education for newly recruited executive assistants or mid-career assistants who will be working in multinational company environment.
Further study on this subject, however, will be required as the case of executive assistant in targeted corporation A is not sufficient to fully represent the sum of all executive assistants in multi-national companies and also for the point that the outcome of this study was primarily derived from a subjective perspective of the research target group.