Moss.
3 Mistakes to
Avoid When Working With a Virtual Assistant
Dorie Clark
Like many entrepreneurs, I was introduced to the concept
of working with a virtual assistant, or VA, by Tim Ferriss’ The
4-Hour Workweek. He extolled the benefits of outsourcing repetitive work
(or tasks you aren't good at or don't enjoy) so you can
focus on your most valuable tasks.
Lured by the idea of following the 80/20 rule (i.e., spending
my time on the 20 percent of activities that generate 80 percent of my
returns), for the past six years, I’ve worked off and on with VAs locally and
around the world. They've handled a variety of tasks for me, including
transcription, sharing articles on social media, uploading and formatting blog
posts,
audio and video editing, writing interview questions, and more.
If you’re considering hiring one -- or would like to
improve your working relationship
with the ones you’re currently contracting with -- here
are three mistakes to avoid.
1. Failing to
scope out your tasks. Well before you hire a VA, it’s useful to make a list of
tasks that you’d like them to perform for you. In my case, it includes things
like booking travel arrangements, uploading blog posts and sharing articles on
social media. Creating an accurate task list can help you select a VA with the
right experience and aptitude. Once you hire your VA -- either through personal
networking, placing an ad or perhaps by using a service such as Zirtual--
you’ll also want to put
the same level of advance thought into describing each
individual task you’d like accomplished.
This is especially critical if you’re dealing with an
overseas VA whose cultural reference points
may be different than yours; they may not understand that
booking a Boston to Atlanta flight
with a layover in Los Angeles is a very, very bad idea.
You can save yourself a great deal of trouble later by being very precise in
your instructions and trying to anticipate questions your VA
might have or ways things might go wrong.
2. Not making
time to review their work. It’s tempting to think that once you hire a VA,
you can delegate the task and then forget it. But, at
least at first, that’s definitely not how
it works. You need to build time into
your calendar to review everything they do,
so you can catch problems early and
offer suggestions and feedback.
Some VAs may be hesitant to alert you if
they’ve hit a roadblock or don’t understand
your instructions. So checking
in frequently and monitoring their progress in the early days can ensure they’re not
going down blind alleyways trying to follow instructions they’ve misconstrued.
It’s easy to get busy and ignore your VA temporarily;
they’re not demanding your time the way a client would.
But if you want them to be effective,
plan at least 30 minutes per day to review their work
early on. That gives them timely
and actionable feedback, and will save you money because
they’re less likely to have to go back
and redo tons of work.
3. Not
creating a system. One of the best things I did with my most recent VA was
developing
an “assistant’s manual” prior to her starting the job. I
wrote down step-by-step procedures
for the most common tasks I’d be asking her to
do and put all the relevant information,
such as website passwords or frequent flier numbers, into
one easy-to-search document. (Depending on the task, you could also consider
making online videos to demonstrate procedures to your VA.) That ensured she wasn’t constantly barraging
me with basic questions and she could quickly become self-reliant. When she
took on a new task, I also instructed her to write up the procedure and include it in the manual, so that it
could become an ongoing reference tool for the future. The goal is to enable an easy transition
and avoid having to reinvent the wheel when there’s been a long gap in
between performing a particular task (such as uploading a blog post to a
particular website with its own layout quirks).
Working with a VA can exponentially increase your
productivity – but that’s only if you fully leverage their time and talents.
You’ll never harness the real benefit if you’re constantly having to clean up
mistakes and do things over again. The only way to avoid that is by planning in
advance and setting up the systems that will enable them to
succeed.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237858
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