Hi 👋 I’m Anna, I currently work as an Executive Assistant at Monzo. I work remotely from the North East of England with my sidekick Pablo, a stubborn French Bulldog who loves his sleep and enjoys lots of snacks to keep up his napping energy.
I started my journey at Monzo as a Customer Operations Assistant (COp) servicing our Business Banking customers. I moved into a Team Manager role (Squad Captain) from there and more recently made a jump into the People collective as a Coordinator which transitioned into becoming an Executive Assistant, currently supporting the People Collective. Before joining Monzo I was working at a high street bank, following a realisation that the graduate retail management programme I’d studied 3 years to get was in fact, not for me! I was attracted to Monzo initially because it seemed fun, relatable, ambitious and worlds apart from the traditional banking environment I’d been working in for the previous few years. Not to mention the opportunity to work remotely and have added flexibility.
What does the role of an EA look like?
Executive assistants support the success of the executive, and as a result, the company. Responsible for managing the executive’s time and emails, supporting in meetings and document preparation, travel logistics, admin and much more.
The role of an Executive Assistant at Monzo is fast paced, varied and requires you to be able to navigate decisions with sometimes incomplete information. Every day brings something new! Skills you must have as an EA include:
Strong organisational skills and prioritisation when managing the diary and inbox.
You’ll need to keep your finger on the pulse and support your exec in navigating priorities.
Relationship building is something that may not be first to mind when you think of an EA, but building strong working relationships, extending your network and raising your profile is fundamental to being able to work more proactively. Allowing you to better understand, anticipate and recognise business needs.
An EA is often calm under pressure, has attention to detail at the heart of everything they do and isn’t afraid to challenge thinking to improve efficiency.
A day in my life as an EA
Checking Exec diaries and my own. As well as Email and slack triage. Dealing with meeting requests, booking meeting rooms, responding to emails and preparing materials for the day’s meetings.
Attending Leadership meetings, coordinating attendance, taking minutes and following up on actions.
Supporting projects for teams in my area. Pulling together research, preparing presentation decks and papers as well as working on longer term collective priorities, goals and upcoming events.
Keeping on top of regular admin like expenses and travel.
Although this role is very different on the face of it from my COp role. Many of the skills required to service customers well are what currently allow me to contribute to better outcomes by enabling performance for the Execs I support. A day in the life of a COp requires lots of context switching, keeping your finger on process changes, prioritisation and problem solving.
What my career journey looked like
I didn’t undertake specific qualifications to move into this role or have previous experience but throughout every role I’ve done at Monzo I’ve aimed to perform to my best ability and learn something new along the way.
As a Business Banking COp, I supported a fast changing and developing Business customer product. You can often find yourself serving 4 customers at one time and then context switching to resolve more complex customer queries. The satisfaction of receiving great feedback from a customer or managing to turn a challenging customer call into a positive outcome was the most rewarding part of this role for me, which is surprising as I started off super anxious about taking calls!
To support my growth I started shadowing experts and deputising for my team manager, taking on performance management resulting in a secondment as a team manager myself. The Team Manager role at Monzo involves managing a team of around 10-12 COps. This included team support and development, driving performance within the team, instilling a customer-centric culture, working towards wider domain goals and making improvements to processes and procedures.
Being a Team Manager allowed me to start understanding the direction and goals of the business, balancing its needs with supporting the growth and development of those in my team and being accountable for driving high performance at Monzo. Relationship building, stakeholder management and managing difficult conversations were just a few of the skills this role taught me.
Taking a secondment as a People Coordinator
From here I saw the ‘People Coordinator’ role advertised, which I’d describe as a blend of EA responsibilities and project support within the People collective. I’m a logical thinker - I enjoy admin and organisation - this role seemed to play into my strengths so I took my shot, dreaming of colour coordinated calendars!
My main challenges were event planning, network building and most of all building up my knowledge of how the business works - learning how to navigate the greater ambiguity and variation compared to Operations. However after a successful secondment I progressed into my current role as Executive Assistant!
Embracing growth opportunities
Being open to feedback, teachings and new challenges was my key to quick growth. Again I sought the expertise of the much more experienced assistants around me but also invested time in learning the roles across my collective and putting my hand up to try out something new. The culture at Monzo is what’s allowed me to do this; my manager told me: “You're going to make mistakes, and that’s ok!”
Supporting those around me is something I’ve always leant into as a COp, manager and also in this role. Being an EA allows me to contribute to and support a whole collective.
Monzo has shown me you don’t need tons of experience and qualifications, you just need to be willing to embrace each phase of your career journey as an opportunity for professional development. If you’re looking to move into a new role, tell your manager, ask for feedback, be open to hear your skill gaps and find opportunities that will help you bridge those. There’s so much opportunity if you want to take it!
Come work with us!
At Monzo, we offer a dynamic and collaborative work environment, competitive salaries, and opportunities for career growth and development. If you're interested in joining our team, visit our careers page for more information on our current job openings.