The ability to delegate work and free up your schedule is one of the most enjoyable aspects of working with a virtual assistant. This appears easy enough: you hand over any chores you don’t have the time, skills, or willpower to complete yourself. In fact, delegating tasks to a VA is an art in itself.
To begin, you must first determine which tasks are best suited for delegating. Then you must give the VA with enough direction to be able to complete the tasks to your satisfaction. Finally, you must develop the attitude of relinquishing control of a portion of your firm.
Consider your own skills and shortcomings, as well as what consumes the majority of your time and what you dislike doing. Most small business owners will want to outsource certain responsibilities to a VA.
Keeping track of your time might appear straightforward, but as your company expands, you’ll be responsible for more duties. Moving things around on your calendar and rescheduling appointments while also staying on top of deadlines may be difficult.
Even sending you reminders before a meeting or telling you when you must complete an important to-do might require a lot of your attention. Your VA can help you manage this time-consuming task.
Communication as we know it is slowly becoming obsolete. Email, for example, has a way of consuming all of our time even though we still forget to respond to emergency communications.
Your virtual receptionist may clean your inbox for you: spam is filtered out, urgent messages are notified of, and other items that can wait are kept. Some of the emails you receive are also of the newsletters, alerts, or news type. These may be categorized by your assistant so you can read them at your leisure.
It’s very typical for startup founders to conduct a lot of research. You could need to find out what your rivals are doing, learn more about potential clients and investors, and explore new possibilities, among other things.
You might not realize it, but you may lose hours every day while looking up information online. Each day, we spend far more time online than we think. This can lead to a lot of wasted time if you’re unsure where to look or get sidetracked by other things on the internet. A Virtual manager who is familiar with research will know the best resources to use.
A company’s data can be quite beneficial to it — but if you know how to make use of it. From website and social media analytics to raw data like contact information, a VA may transform numbers into useful reports or insights.
Whether you have a team of virtual employees or are working with another firm, you’ll need someone in charge. You may require to be constantly monitoring progress, communicating with team members, establishing deadlines for each new activity, and ensuring that everyone is hitting their targets when there are a lot of moving pieces.
It’s probably better to outsource all of this to a VA with prior project management experience rather than attempting it yourself.
There are so many figures to deal with that they may give anyone a migraine. Your accounts might be kept up to date by an assistant. Invoicing, accounting, payroll, and other bookkeeping activities are some of the things you may delegate.
You need to be on social media in order to improve your awareness and stay connected with clients. The issue is that producing content, reacting to feedback, and planning take a lot of time.
You may obtain value from social media without sacrificing other employment by outsourcing some (or even all) of your social media activities to a online assistant.
To get the most out of your VA you’ll need to understand some delegation basics from the start.
It makes no sense to figure out what tasks you should delegate as you go along; before hiring a virtual assistant, you must first know. This will ensure that you pick someone with the necessary skills and experience. You may always add more work to the list either assigning it to the same person or recruiting another VA.
You can apply some of the same techniques you would use to bring remote workers on board. The amount of onboarding required will be determined by how much work the VA will be performing for you.
Put yourself in your virtual assistant’s position. What kinds of instructions would you need to complete each activity? Simple activities may be completed with a single sentence, but more complex tasks may require background knowledge or even training using a specific tool. Consider how you could best convey the information; sometimes a video depicting a process is more effective than written directions.
Consider carefully how much information your remote assistant needs for every activity you allocate. Going into too much detail at times (particularly if the VA has more expertise performing the job than you) is superfluous or even confusing. However, oversimplified instructions might result in errors and confusions on other occasions.
If you don’t provide clear deadlines for your tasks, it’s hard for an assistant to decide what to focus on. If you tell your VA to complete work “as soon as possible,” you run the danger of alienating different people with varying interpretations of this phrase. If your remote assistant is already swamped with other clients’ jobs, your tasks might not get done.
If a deadline is malleable, create a provisional due date and let the VA know that it can deliver the work a few days late. However, if you have an ironclad deadline, inform them as well.
Create a project to keep track of your VA’s performance and add new activities as they arise by using Asana. Creating a folder on Google Drive is the most basic option. If you have many people working for you (perhaps several VAs performing different duties), project management software like Asana may be useful.
It’s critical for your VA to be able to come to you with any questions or concerns and to clear up anything when instructions are not clear-cut. If video chatting is more convenient, stay connected on your favorite software at all times. Slack is a fantastic alternative if sending brief notes is more practical. It’s far preferable than emailing back and forth about simple matters.
Timekeeping is critical to understanding how your assistant spends his or her time. Most tools allow you to view how much time the individual is spending on each app and website.
It’s also a good idea to take screenshots. All of this is helpful in determining whether or not it’s worthwhile to outsource the work. You may realize that you can complete the task faster than before, or maybe you just need an extra experienced assistant.
One way to demonstrate that not everything needs your personal touch is to start cutting back on the activities that bore you. Consider what other elements of your company might benefit after you’ve seen how much easier it is.
You had the vision, but your company has already develop much more than your initial concept. You’ve come to the realization that you can’t manage everything on your own.
Even if you don’t know everything there is to know about your specialty, and all of the elements necessary to start a company. Staying in control will only do you harm in the long term.
Ideas are one of the ways that you’re limited if you try to do it all yourself. When several individuals are involved in the creative process, it’s more innovative. Bringing in VAs from various backgrounds to help your firm solve problems, speed things up, and provide fresh ideas to develop its services is a fantastic way to improve problem solving, streamline your business, and offer the best service possible.
If you want any of the above tasks to get done, you’ll need to trust your remote assistant to pay attention to the details, deliver high-quality services, and be trustworthy.
This may imply that you have to pay more than the minimum fee for certain skilled work. Using an outsourcing platform with a long list of positive reviews or working with a trusted agency might be worth it if you’re not sure about your VA.
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