Working Well With your Online Personal Assistant

Since the advent of the internet and the prevalence of e-commerce as an integral part of business, there has been an evident surge in virtual jobs. A growing number of executives are opting to hire virtual assistants who are capable of doing the job well through virtual interaction from comforts of their homes.

Hiring an Online Personal Assistant

While hiring a virtual assistant is a cost-effective and convenient decision, many a times, executives find it hard to optimize their services. Professionals end up constantly bombarding their assistants with emails with instructions that are consistently misunderstood, resulting in wastage of valuable resources and not to mention a stressful relationship with your personal assistant.

Before you go through the ordeal of firing your virtual assistant and looking for a new one again, reconsider your working methods and see if you make any improvements on your current arrangement.

Here are a few interesting points you can consider to make sure you are working well with your online personal assistant –

1. Establishing a Discipline with Working Hours

Just because your virtual assistant works from home, it does not mean his or her life will not be as busy as yours. Have a face to face meeting or a telephone conversation with your assistant to understand each other’s daily schedule and find a way to come on a common group with respect to defining standard working hours. This way you can set realistic expectations for your assignments and plan your daily communication a lot better. Also keep you assistant informed about the times of the day it is best to get in touch with you.

2. Identify a Method of Communication

Discuss with your assistant, what according to the two of you will be the most effective way to talk on a routine basis. Do you think your communication is easier on the phone or on email? On the phone you can make sure that there are minimal misunderstandings, while your email can be a record of all the tasks that have been assigned to your personal assistant. You may also arrive at a mutual combination of both modes of communication, depending on the nature of your work.

3. How are you Writing your Emails?

Trying to discuss everything in a single email can get confusing for you as well as your assistant. Try to limit only one agenda for every email that you send out or receive. This will make it a lot easier for you and your virtual assistant to organize your projects and enhance productivity.

4. Scheduling your Communications

Make sure that you make it a habit to organize a weekly de-briefing session over the phone to discuss certain matters, and keep a check on the status of various projects your assistant is handling at that point. With these weekly telephone talks, you can make sure you are bridging the gap that comes with sending out emails and you can also maintain a certain level of mutual understanding.

In addition to this, remember to set monthly goals for your assistant. This way you can make sure your business is on track and that you and your virtual assistant are working on the same page.

Benefits of Hiring an Online Personal Assistant for a Startup’s Processes

It’s always a hard-hitting task for a green field venture to decide on whether to hire a virtual assistant, or to handle everything on its own. In addition, for a home start up, it also becomes difficult to accommodate the assistant’s workplace. However, with all that a startup business demands, it’s convenient to outsource some of the business tasks to an online personal assistant.

Let’s discuss why a virtual assistant works in favour of a start up.

Time and Value

Outsourcing your jobs to an online assistant will dramatically shrink your secretarial tasks and add to your time to commit for the growth of your business. If you look into the value proposition of the model, the per hour outlay on a virtual assistant is much less in comparison to the real value you create for your business.

Cost

To hire a full time in-house personal assistant would be an additional outlay of a fixed salary, benefits, entitlements and training for a person. This generally is simply unaffordable and an avoidable outflow for start-ups.As an alternative, a monthly flexible fee paid for the services rendered by online assistants is lucrative for start-ups.

Outlining Business Processes

The start up company requires outlining the workflow processes for marketing, sales, and administrative tasks, ahead of hiring the personnel for respective functions. A virtual personal assistant can do an incredible job in putting the written process documents for a start up, saving time for the founders.

Business Communications

A start up requires being very active on networking and social media along with general communications on emails. An online assistant can come to aid in handling company emails, sales queries, live chat windows and getting the onerous task of month-end reports on time. A virtual personal assistant can competently manage all these jobs at a negligible cost to the start up.

Reaching the Market

In a start up, when you launch your product, all the back end processes need to be streamlined, along with collection of post launch queries and feedback from the market. An online assistant works proficiently to take care of all the pre and post launch activities so that you can focus on the product launch.

Iteration and relaunch

The initial product launch is never streamlined and do encompass teething issues. Quite a few times, there might be requirements to iterate and relaunch the product quickly. An online assistant collects and focuses on customer’s feedback for businesses to act upon and make modifications or additions on their product.

Most entrepreneurs need a paradigm shift of their thought process to outsource some business work to an online personal assistant to ease the company’s overheads, and at the same time, not bring in any compromise on business processes.