Tips To Manage Your VA At Best
When people say “virtual assistant,” they might mean different things. For the purpose of this article, we’re talking about remote administrative help, and assume the following three things:
- They work remotely. Your VA will not be sitting next to you in your office or someplace near. All your communication will be online or on the phone, and you may never meet your VA face-to-face even if you work with them for years. A remote working relationship has its own quirky challenges.
- They’re global. That is, they don’t live and work in the same state or country as you. The customs, laws and standard business practices they know may be different from the ones affecting you.
- They’re generalists, and not domain experts. For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume your VA is not a domain or industry expert. They provide administrative help, not specific consulting.
Now that we’re on the same page about what a VA is and isn’t, let’s get to work!
1. Establish your workflow early.
Do you expect your VA to be available at certain hours of the day, everyday? Or can they mostly work on longer tasks and just give weekly updates? Set expectations for when you want to be online and available to reduce the frustration from not being able to reach your VA when you need them the most.
Discuss your potential task list with your VA. Hopefully, you already did this during the vetting and hiring phase, but it helps to go through the list again with your VA after you’ve hired them. If you’re hiring a firm, the VA assigned to you may not be the same person you talked to while interviewing the firm. By giving your VA an idea of the work coming down the pipe, they can better prepare for it. When you’re dealing with a firm that might mean getting sub-VAs that specialize in the tasks on your list.
Ask them to send you a weekly (or daily or monthly, depending on the number of hours you’ve booked) breakdown of tasks they’ve done and how long it took each task.
Prefer communication. Your VA will be able to handle whatever communications medium you prefer. It may be by phone or IMÂ or email. While you’re at it, tell them how you prefer to be reached, at what times and for which problems. You don’t want to have your VA sending you an email when they should have called about a question on a time-sensitive project, and conversely, you don’t want them calling you at all hours of the night for trivial questions.
2. Try different tasks in the beginning to gauge your VAs strengths and weaknesses.
During the vetting and hiring phase, hopefully you found a VA that specializes in the tasks you will be assigning. However, and this is especially true of micro businesses that have few people doing a large variety of work, you may have a range of tasks that require different skill sets. For example, sending you email and responding to responses requires people skills, whereas data entry requires being very detail oriented.
When you first start working with your VA, don’t be afraid to try different tasks. You may find that your VA can accomplish more than you hoped for. If that’s the case, you may assign this VA higher level tasks that require some thinking, and choose to hire a lower cost VA to do the data entry work.
To Be Continued…
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I have utilized the offshore VA for quite awhile now on projects. This has proven to be a huge asset and something I highly recommend in my blog. While some may recommend the use of just one, I often maintain multiple ones due to the reasons listed in item #2. Definitely an essential resource!