If you’re looking for extra hands to help with administrative, routine, and non-priority work needed to keep your business running, outsourcing jobs to a virtual assistant (VA) is a solid way to save money, improve efficiency, and increase efficiency.
VAs are skilled professionals who work remotely and are based in different parts of the world, namely Latin and Central America, the Phillippines, and South Asia. You can even find assistants based in North America and the U.K. VAs are usually much cheaper to hire than a full-time employee — you can find a VA for as little as $5/hour on professional marketplaces, or hire through an outsourcing agency and pay $2,000 – $3,000 for a full-time assistant. You can hire a VA specializing in social media, graphic design, email management, data entry, real estate, law, medicine, web development, and more. If you need extra help, you can hire a personal (executive assistant) or a virtual chief of staff, who perform specific tasks.
Hiring a VA is the first step toward building a more efficient and productive business. You also need to leverage their skills and talent to make the most of them, using effective communication to streamline tasks. If you’ve just hired/about to hire an assistant, this blog will help you maximize the resources at your disposal. Read on for 10 tips on how to work with your VA!
If you’re new to working with VAs, take the time to learn to work with one before hiring more to staff your company. Remember, you want assistants to work efficiently and contribute to productivity, not take away from it. Working closely with one VA can teach you how to communicate effectively, delegate better, and train employees to your working style. Hiring more than required can be expensive, especially if you run a bootstrapped company.
To make the most of working with a VA, ask yourself these questions before hiring: What do I need help with? How many hours a week should I hire an assistant for? Should I hire a VA working in the same timezone? Is this a short or long-term project? What is my budget? Are these tasks difficult and, if so, will they require the expertise of a specialized VA? Having these answers ready will help you determine and better evaluate the tasks or projects you need to complete and the kind of VA you need to hire.
If possible, meet your assistants in person before they begin work to get to know them better and familiarize them with how the company operates. If they are based abroad, try to organize meetings that introduce them to the team and make them feel included. Encourage questions, and be available to clear any doubts they have, especially in the first weeks they work for you. You can even evaluate how well you onboard new assistants by asking them for feedback that can be implemented with new hires.
Your VA can only be as good as the instructions you give them. Clearly state what you expect from your assistant when you onboard them and list the organization’s priorities and objectives. Poor, inefficient, or irregular communication — ad-hoc task delegation, overworking, and the absence of clear instructions — can affect a VA’s quality of work and their trust in organizational leadership. You can leverage communication channels like Slack, email, and video calls to touch base with your assistant. Scheduling regular meetings, like weekly check-ins, can help you understand how well the assistant fits in at your business and nip any minor issues that may arise.
Your onboarding process should be comprehensive and mention what the company expects from the assistant. This can include parameters like working hours, response times, quality of work, confidentiality, and task prioritization. Let your VA know the times they need to be available (this doesn’t always have to align with your working hours, especially for assistants based in different time zones), how often they should check their messages, set quality of work standards like accuracy and attention to detail, and help them understand how to recognize urgent tasks and prioritize accordingly.
Providing regular and consistent feedback can help motivate your VA to do better, help them grow, and familiarize them with your company’s working style. You can use this opportunity to improve your ability to offer constructive feedback, thereby improving your communication skills. Commend assistants for work done well and highlight and correct mistakes while being patient and friendly. You can even suggest ways for them to improve their work. For example, if they haven’t responded to client emails promptly, they can color-code and mark incoming emails as important so they can remember to draft a reply within 24 hours.
A workflow with clear instructions, processes, and guidelines can ensure tasks are completed promptly while meeting organizational quality standards. You can establish a functional workflow by listing tasks you need a VA to complete and grouping them based on urgency, writing up a document with detailed guidelines for specific tasks, and setting deadlines that work for you and the VA. You can monitor a VA’s work and send feedback via open communication channels.
Depending on your preferences and the nature of the project or task, you can use several digital tools to maximize productivity. These include project management tools like Trello and Asana that make task lists and timelines and can be integrated with Slack and Google Workplace. Toggl tracks how much time is used on tasks, making tracking productivity and billing hours easier. Notion and Confluence can be used to create and manage documents and folders, making it easy to track ideas and share information.
Delegating well is an essential skill to being a good and efficient manager. As a good delegator, you are skilled at assessing your workload and knowing what your VA can do. You will be able to match VAs with tasks based on their skills, give detailed briefs on the task at hand, set workable deadlines, and leverage management tools to ensure tasks are completed within a specified timeframe.
An effective and efficient VA should have the autonomy to make decisions, especially on routine tasks, without seeking approval. This could relate to rescheduling a meeting, pre-empting a bottleneck, and deleting a product listing if it is unavailable, among others. You can also ask VAs to review a project once it's completed issues and ask them to implement processes to handle them better next time. This encourages proactivity among VAs and produces better results.
Founded by serial entrepreneurs, Leverage Assistants is a white-glove service that helps you find 1% assistants and then teaches you how to build leverage with them. If you're interested in a strategy session to learn how to use an assistant, click here.
Stephen is one of the founders of Lumiere and a Harvard College graduate. He founded Lumiere as a Ph.D. student at Harvard Business School. Lumiere is a selective research program where students work 1-1 with a research mentor to develop an independent research paper.
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