The role of corporate secretaries, spanning governance and compliance, managing board meetings and liaising between the board and company shareholders, is one of the most demanding in any organization. Today, corporate secretaries have to address diverse challenges, from staying up to date with the ever-changing regulations and communicating these to various stakeholders to implementing new approaches and technologies within their companies.
Such a multitude of responsibilities handled by corporate secretaries calls for new approaches to bring efficiency, ensure organizational success and minimize the chances of burnout. Fortunately, there are a few strategies which can be helpful for corporate secretaries to prevent career fatigue and provide for sustained productivity with a healthy life-work balance.
Below, we discuss the most widespread approaches to minimize burnout, ranging from organizational and human-centered practices to applying technology to boost efficiency and alleviate the administrative burden.
Recognizing Burnout
Recognizing burnout is important from a personal and organizational standpoint as the first step on the road to productivity and resilience. Meanwhile, a failure to recognize burnout can have a heavy toll both on businesses and individuals, resulting in higher employee turnover rates, reduction in productivity and severe strain on the physical and mental health of corporate secretaries.
By recognizing burnout as a detriment to organizational success and personal productivity, corporate secretaries can plan steps to address burnout before it spirals out of control. Spotting early signs of burnout include identifying behavioral, physical and emotional changes resulting from a lack of efficient processes, inadequate support or excessive workload.
The most common manifestations of burnout include constant exhaustion and struggle with concentration, among others. If left unattended, the state of burnout can lead to mood swings, detachment from work, lower productivity and absenteeism.
By identifying early signs of burnout, corporate secretaries can devise a remedial plan to address both personal and organizational factors leading to work-related exhaustion. Having a clear understanding of such factors helps to develop effective strategies, fill in the gaps in the organization, delegate work and seek support from available resources.
Strategies to Minimize Burnout
While the efficiency of a particular strategy for minimizing burnout may vary depending on the individual, their environment and circumstances, there are common approaches which help address productivity issues for corporate secretaries in modern organizations. Our list starts with three effective approaches to handle burnout from a personal standpoint, which can be further complemented by organizational resources as well as technology.
Establishing clear boundaries
In today's partly remote and hybrid environment, setting clear boundaries for work-related responsibilities and personal life while delegating duties and collaborating with other team members and stakeholders can be extremely challenging. This is especially true for corporate secretaries, considering the scope of their responsibilities and multitude of interactions with various stakeholders in their organizations.
Company secretaries who fail to delineate such limits face continuous risks of overextending themselves, which can lead to burnout and all of its negative consequences. In addition, corporate secretaries need to establish such boundaries not only for themselves but also communicate them to other teams, delegating responsibilities and setting clear expectations.
Effective time management
A complex approach to minimizing burnout should always include an effective time management strategy to define a clear schedule, prioritize tasks and set realistic goals for their fulfillment. Although most corporate secretaries have already mastered time management during their careers, revisiting existing practices and adapting to circumstances prove crucial in light of the ever-changing demands.
Being one of the top pillars of productivity, effective time management results in increased quality of work and provides more quality time for personal activities. Fortunately, there is no shortage of applications and tools contributing to efficient time management, scheduling and calendaring. In addition, corporate secretaries need to set clear priorities for critical tasks, maintain an internal schedule with deadlines and be adamant about its fulfillment by all involved teams.
Continuous skills development
Staying on top of industry and technologies and seeking professional growth opportunities is essential for any role and even more so for corporate secretaries. Given the number of diverse teams and technologies used within organizations, corporate secretaries need to have a bird's eye view of the trends and lead their organizations to ensure effective governance and compliance functions.
Having a diverse skill set and learning continuously about new approaches, methods and tools allows corporate secretaries to excel within their organizations and fulfill their leadership role within compliance and other teams. Learning new technologies and resources dedicated to corporate governance and compliance and participating in conferences, webinars and training programs helps corporate secretaries stay abreast of the changes and ensure they remain current.
The Role of Time-Saving Software
The remaining two out of the five most effective ways to minimize burnout on our list include the application of digital tools. While corporate secretaries typically use a diverse technology stack, the implementation of modern entity management software proves to have a most significant impact on all types of functions, including governance, compliance, record keeping, reporting and board management.
Implementation of entity management software
The adoption of entity management software makes a huge difference for all teams, including corporate secretaries, compliance officers and administrative staff.
Modern entity management software like Athennian creates a single source of truth for all corporate records, bringing reporting, filing and compliance work to another level. In addition to its rich functionality for maintaining legal entities, director appointment and reporting directors and shareholders, entity management software boosts communication and cooperation among diverse teams on a single platform. On top of that, it allows creating automatic workflows, minimizes routine manual tasks and presents rich org charting capabilities.
Alleviating administrative burden with software
The constantly changing regulatory landscape and geographic reach of global organizations create significant administrative burdens for corporate secretaries and compliance teams. The sheer number of data points that have to be collected, stored, updated and filed calls for the application of digital tools and technologies spanning a broad range of functions and designed around modern organizations.
Corporate secretaries can minimize the chances of burnout and greatly facilitate their work, including the work of their administrative teams, by regularly updating their tech stack with modern technology such as entity management software, board portal software, project management applications and other tools. By remaining up-to-date on technological advancements, corporate secretaries can alleviate administrative burdens through automating routine manual tasks, improving the quality of data and boosting communication and efficiency across the board.
Learn more with Athennian
The multitude of functions and regulatory complexity of the modern business environment creates significant challenges for corporate secretaries in global organizations. Under these circumstances, company secretaries need to implement organizational and interpersonal strategies as well as utilize modern digital tools to ensure productivity and minimize the chances of burnout.
Among the multitude of technologies, entity management software stands as one of the most powerful tools for automating routine manual tasks for compliance teams and improving the overall efficiency of modern organizations. For more information on how the adoption of technology can assist corporate secretaries in their work, please don't hesitate to contact the Athennian team for a free consultation and demo.
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