The purpose of why you hired a virtual assistant is to delegate tasks to the virtual assistant, allowing you to have more free time to do other income generating activities in your business.
While the virtual assistant takes care of clerical tasks, customer support, schedule appointments, administrative duties, generate leads, and data management, you have the opportunity to work on growing your business, implementing marketing strategies, and management. To use your virtual assistant to her full potential, and to optimize your time, it is important to delegate the tasks to the virtual assistant correctly.
By explaining the purpose of the task in the broader goal of the business, it gives the virtual assistant a bigger picture of what their contribution to the business is. This is a motivator and will encourage the virtual assistant to do her best, realizing she is actively contributing. Explain to the virtual assistant that the successful leads she generates, will assists you with your marketing campaign, enhancing the success rate of the campaign, . The virtual assistant realizes how vitally important the accuracy and standard of her work is, because it indirectly and sometimes directly reflected in the outcome of successful results.
It is essential to the virtual assistant to receive clear instructions. Instructions that are difficult to interpret, will not only waste time, but can have a delaying effect on the whole project. The virtual assistant should know exactly what to do, and shouldn’t need to repeat the tasks because of your poor communications when giving the instructions.
Communications should be easy and possible at all times. Decide in the beginning what method of communication will suite you both. Encourage the virtual assistant to ask questions if something is not clear, instead of not understanding and doing poor quality work or by doing the task in the wrong way. Find the happy medium where you monitor the virtual assistant’s work, without watching over her shoulder continuously. You should have set guidelines of working hours, amount of results expected and in what time period. Reporting differs from person to person. Some virtual assistant need only to report weekly and others need to report daily. The task itself will also influence the frequency of reporting. Building trust is important to work in harmony and to produce effectively.
Projects should have a beginning date and an ending date. Intermittent feedback of results should also be set in place, especially with large projects or intricate tasks. This will also help to determine the speed at which you expect a job to be done, compared to the actual speed of the virtual assistant. You could be pleasantly surprised with what she delivers versus what you expected.
One of the keys in growing your business is a healthy relationship with your virtual assistant. You are a team working together, and a good relationship will enhance the results. Time is money. Your virtual assistant is a financial outlay in the beginning but that will soon change. The productiveness of your virtual assistant, allows you free time, which you can use to generate income and to grow your business.
About Out of the Office Virtual Assistance:
At Out of the Office, we are committed to providing earth-friendly administration and offer ideas and ways to increase your productivity, decrease your workload, and work more efficiently. We nurture a successful business relationship, while continuing to grow as your business partner. We are focused on streamlining your administration, social media planning and execution, and offering creative solutions for your business success.
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