Philippines staffing guide
A First-30-Days Scorecard for a New Assistant
Measure whether the brief, the access, and the review path are working, not whether a new hire seems busy.
Published · 8 minute read
On this page
The first month with a new assistant is a test of the operating design as much as the person. If the brief is vague, the access is late, or the review path is undefined, a capable assistant will still struggle. A scorecard should therefore separate what the assistant controls from what the owner and the system control, and it should produce a fix list rather than a verdict.
Start with access and tools
Record the date each system was requested, granted, and tested. An assistant who cannot open the ticketing system until day nine has lost a week through no fault of their own. Check that the account is named, the permissions match the role, and the backup contact is reachable. Access delays are the most common first-month failure and the easiest to measure.
Test the brief with three real tasks
Pick one routine task, one task with a missing fact, and one task near a boundary. Ask the assistant to complete the first, ask a question on the second, and stop on the third. The results show whether the written instructions, the escalation path, and the stop rule are clear. A correct stop is a success, not a gap in productivity.
Count rework by cause
Track returned tasks and label the cause: unclear brief, missing source, wrong owner, access problem, or a genuine mistake. The first four are design issues the owner can fix. Only the last is a performance signal, and even then a single instance is not a pattern. Review a sample together so the label is agreed rather than assumed.
Watch for silent workarounds
A new assistant may invent a private spreadsheet, ask a colleague for a password, or send a draft directly to a client to keep things moving. These workarounds are early warnings. Ask in the weekly check-in what was harder than expected and what they had to figure out alone. Then fix the missing instruction or permission instead of only correcting the behavior.
Set the thirty-day review questions in advance
Ask whether the assistant can name the owner for each major work lane, find the current procedure without help, describe what they must not decide, and show where evidence is stored. These questions test the operating system. Add one question about workload and one about what should change in the brief. Record the answers and assign owners to the fixes.
Close the month with a written plan
End with three actions: one for the owner, one for the assistant, and one for the team. Examples might be updating the intake form, completing a tool certification, or adding a backup reviewer. A scorecard that ends without a plan is only a report card. The point is to make month two easier than month one.