2 Tips Steps to Get the Most out of Your Virtual Assistant Services

To get the most out of your virtual assistant service, it helps to have a plan about how you’re going to communicate your needs, the extent to which you will manage the virtual assistant service, and how you’re going to shape the relationship so that it keeps improving. Here are four easy steps to make sure that you are effectively delegating tasks to your virtual assistant.

1. Set expectations and communicate them: There’s an overarching reason that you got a virtual assistant, your time is valuable and you need help in your personal and/or professional life. Perhaps you are looking to visualize business tasks such as getting bookkeeping off your plate, to manage your social media accounts, or to help plan an event. There are also specific goals that you want your virtual assistant.

Letting your virtual assistant know both your overarching and specific goals is important. When you tell your virtual assistant the reason they were hired, you’re giving them generally applicable guidance on what is important to you. If the reason that you got a virtual assistant was to get bookkeeping off your plate, that sets the expectation that you want your virtual assistant service to functioning with a high degree of autonomy. If you got a virtual assistant to do the legwork on planning your event, that suggests a more collaborative relationship.

2. Come up with a plan: Now that you have your goals, you’ll need to figure out how your virtual assistant service should start them. Some of this process be simple. You may simply need to tell your virtual assistant how you have done things and have her repeat what you have done. However, you may also need to devise new processes to get your goals done.

Work with your virtual assistant to figure out how she will do your goals. Your virtual assistant likely has experience she can bring to bear about the best way to delegate these tasks to her. You’ll also want to get in the habit of collaborating with your virtual assistant so that she knows your preferences and can begin to expect how you’ll want things done.Be prepared to give more guidance up front. Developing a working relationship takes time. Your virtual assistant will likely want clarification about your established practices.

In the end, you and your virtual assistant are a team. The better the team you build, the better it will function and the more it can do.