Remote or “virtual” assistants (VA) can provide assistance that frees you up for more important tasks in managing your web business (or the web-based extension of your offline business). And while hiring a VA requires some due diligence (interviewing, matching skillsets with the tasks, billing discussions, etc.), even after you find the “right” assistant you’re still not guaranteed a successful working relationship.
When you hire a virtual assistant you become a client and a manager – which means you play an important role in the effectiveness of your VA. Think you have experience managing people, and that you’ll use the same skillset with your virtual assistant? Think again. Managing a remote assistant can be very different from managing an assistant who works by your side. Here are a few tips to help ensure a smooth working relationship:
Set Expectations: this is a standard management good practice that holds true with all assistants – virtual or otherwise. But I’ll argue argue that, as with most of these tips, setting expectations is even more important with a virtual assistant. Because you’re likely to interact with your virtual assistant less often than you would an assistant in the room next door, it’s worth your time to spell out goals and expectations up front, and all along the way. If you expect daily status updates, don’t assume that your VA knows this – tell him/her. If you want specific information included in those updates – make it known.
Provide Feedback Often: Although it’s worth trying, there’s no way you can explain all your expectations up front. Your virtual assistant is bound to make judgement errors. A good virtual assistant will take your feedback, learn from it, and not make the same mistake twice. A great VA will take your feedback, and not only learn from it to avoid making the same mistake again, but also interpret it to understand your preferences and avoid making similar mistakes in the future. The clearer your feedback, the better it allows your assistant to perform.
Communicate Clearly and Explicitly: another key requirement of any good manager (although sorely lacking of so many), verbal communication – written and spoken, as opposed to facial expressions and body language - is often your only method of communication with virtual assistants. In addition to the lack of non-verbal communication, VA’s are also not privy to inner-office conversations that everyone else in the office benefit from. Because VA’s are isolated from your office environment, in order to clearly explain task requirements you have to make a concerted effort to be more verbally explicit when you give instructions.
Repeat Yourself: think you got your point across? Well, if it’s important you better re-state it in every e-mail and every conversation until you hear your virtual assistant say it back to you. Until you hear your VA say what you mean, assume they don’t fully understand your requirements. This doesn’t mean you should treat the individual like they’re stupid – quite the opposite – you should treat yourself like you didn’t explain the task right the first ten times.
Use a Web-Based Task Management Tool: project management or task management software (like Basecamp) helps you create a queue of “to-do’s”, as well as track the status of those items, make comments, and have an audit trail of the work assigned, in progress, and completed. Especially when you’re managing multiple task assignments these tools can offer invaluable time savings by serving as a single point of reference for assistants and client-managers alike. We compared two relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use task management tools in an earlier post (Zoho Projects vs. Basecamp).
Share Documents Online, Rather than with Email: If there’s one way to quickly loose track of the version of a document, and who made the latest changes to that document, it’s to e-mail the document back and forth, with each collaborator making revisions along the way. This tends to happen when you’re collaborating on a single document with anyone in another office – and virtual assistants are prime examples. Some task management tools may have built in document collaboration features, but consider technologies like Google Docs (for text) and eXpresso (for Excel spreadsheets) as well.
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Great post, as always you've hit the nail on the head.
I really wish that there would be a whole lot of different websites such as this — enlightening as well as practical at the same time.
Hi
we are catering firm in surrey bc.Now opening a restorent. We need VA for bussiness plann to apply gov. Assistent loan. Also we need proper advertiesment which will give us result and much more. If you have some one who can do that please advise me and also advise me what will be the coast of bussiness plann. My cell no. Is 604-501-9006 in case you need to call me. Thanks in advance for your early reply.