Have you hired any virtual assistant yet? What’s next?
The most crucial way to work efficiently with your virtual assistant is to dive in and delegate your tasks. By delegating your tasks, I did not mean just overload him with all the tasks which might contain some confidential information as well. At first place, you must know why you hired him and what type of tasks you must assign him, in short how to work with him. Give away the tasks that do not require your specialized attention and you can free up your time to focus on other things which require your attention only.
Let us have a more clear look…
Weight off your shoulders
This is one of the best parts of hiring a virtual assistant. Because this is the reason why you hired him. Start creating the list that you want to get done by your virtual assistant. In fact, you can even add the tasks that you hate to do yourself. Get rid of the hated and loathsome tasks now that populate your to-do list. These can be anything from daily to-do tasks or even once or twice in a weekly task or monthly tasks.
Document your instructions
Accept that you are a human too and you cannot remember everything on your own. The best way is to document what you want to get done and the guidelines to follow them. This will also help out your VA to figure out the things in a well-defined manner which will increase productivity. Also, you have your own style and manner to do particular tasks and when you hire a VA for those tasks, you expect the same. For this, it is important to carefully establish detailed instructions that can help your VA to approach to match your tone and have an understanding of your company, without asking dozens of questions from you. This may consume your time but will generate 100 times better results.
Assign the Tasks
Well, you can judge the next step now. All you need to do is to assign the tasks. If you have hired more than one VA then you need to assign the tasks according to their expertise. Successful delegation is as important as the productivity you expect from their tasks. Look out your VA profile properly and then analyze their expertise and assign the task accordingly.
Acquire the Tools Required
Now when you are done with assigning the tasks, the next comes to monitor your VA. Search in the market and figure out the best tools to get started and make sure you have them. Few important things are Good connectivity Internet connection, a computer/laptop, and an email account through which you can communicate with your VA. Once you have such tools, you can chat or video conference with VA anytime from anywhere. The means to communicate must be highly efficient as this will be the only other easiest source of communication after phone calls. Few of the tools that you can use can be Skype, Dropbox, Hangouts, PayPal, etc. But if you find more here, you’d know that there are other tools that can be used for payments.
Monitor your VA
You cannot see in person how efficiently your VA is working. Is it the right resource? Results are the only metrics by which you can optimize whether the resource is productive or not. But before, look out for login hours and the work he is doing per day. Is he really utilizing his time effectively? Keep a check on him and his work from time to time. You can assign somebody to monitor him like your Manager.
Optimize
After a month, when a few of your tasks have been completed by your VA, look out for the results. Are the results prominent? Analyze how his work contributed to the growth of the company. IF you think his efforts are markable but not making any changes to the growth of the company, then you should first analyze what pitfalls and flaws are there. Have virtual meetings and discuss with him what changes should be made in the plan-making. Also, if you think his efforts are not markable, then you can look for some other VA.
