Training your VA
You're a business owner, super busy in your day with hardly enough time for yourself, let alone a VA.
Frustration arises because they just aren’t doing what you want them to do. Sigh! Sound familiar?
What a lot of business owners don’t know, is the first person to train when hiring a virtual assistant is actually yourself. Yep YOU! If you don’t set up expectations from the start with the job requirements and how you want to communicate, then the VA is literally running like the wind…. a bit like you. As a small business owner, you’re the one with the vision - you see how you want things to roll in your business and a virtual assistant is a fabulous addition. But without training and proper guidance, they may become a hindrance rather than a blessing. To get you on your way to setting up a virtual assistant so you can thrive in your business, let’s discuss 3 important elements:
➡️ Define the role
This needs to happen before you even commence hiring and training the VA. Tasks should be only given to VA’s who have experience with that task and purely focus in that area. Ie SEO should only be given to VA’s who provide SEO as their main role. Ask yourself these questions: What are the core responsibilities of the VA role? What skills does he or she need? How will you measure success within this role? Also, consider who on your team will be interacting with the VA and ensure they are a good match.
➡️ Setting Expectations
Setting expectations is super important, but remember it works both ways. Your VA will also be counting on you to hold up your end of the deal. Here are some questions to consider: • When will you pay your VA - weekly, fortnightly, or monthly and what method will you arrange payment? • How will you track progress? • Digital communication - Slack, Asana, email, or whatever platforms you prefer as your communication channel. How often do you want to communicate - do you have set times that you want to chat? These are all really important pieces to consider. • Work performance - consider a 90 day probationary policy - so if you or your VA are not happy with the relationship it can end.
➡️ Training
This is one of the most important pieces of the VA puzzle. Hiring a VA will be such a great addition to your business, but they need to know what you want for them. Quite often a VA will not ask you for help if they don’t know or understand something. They will spend time trying to work it out. Now is that productive? Nope. One really great way to get great work flowing between you and your VA is to let them know you are there if they have any questions. If they don’t understand something they are welcome to ask you. Another important part is giving them timeframes to complete a task. If you don’t do this it is more than likely they will take a lot longer to complete than is necessary. With my vast experience in administration, I have a very good idea of how long things should take so I give very clear guidelines on tasks and timeframes for the task(s) at hand. If you have given them say 2 hours to complete something, it is a good idea to tell them that if it is taking them more than 2 hours to complete it, to ask you how they can make it better and faster.
This allows you to set boundaries and check-in points so that you can see how things are progressing—and it also creates a healthy challenge for the VA. Remember the VA doesn’t want to let you down and if you give time limits you’ll typically find that they finish their tasks within the established timeframes. If your VA still ends up coming back to you requesting more time, it’s probably because he or she really needs it. 🥰 😍