When you have just hired a virtual assistant for the first time, you’re probably wondering now what the next few weeks would look like. With this article, I will be walking you through the ideal first four weeks of working with a virtual assistant as you walk them through the ins and outs of your company.
1st WEEK: PROVIDE THEM WHAT THEY NEED
On the first week of your virtual assistant, you want to make sure that you are giving your assistant all that they need so they can be ready as they’re going through the first week. Keep in mind that during this stage, your virtual assistant is doing things as they are learning them.
1. Set-up their Task Tracker
During the first week your goal is to just have a task list up and running for your virtual assistant. You can use different tools for this so it is easier for your virtual assistant to know and grab the tasks assigned to them.
2. Set Priority Tasks of the week
Once you’ve set them up with a task list, you must also set the priority task of the week. You might need to do this every single week for the first 30 days just so they would know what is a priority for you. This is just to set expectations on what it is like working with you and what are the things or tasks that you prioritize first. Later on, as they get to know you and your business better, they will be able to outright know what things to do first and what things to do last.
3. Add tasks to Tracker
Once you have the tools in place and have set the priority task of the week, you can then start adding the tasks to their tracker based on the prioritization you’ve created. Either you label them or sort them by color, it’s up to you. The key takeaway is that you have a good system of tracking tasks that’s been prioritized and effectively show or train your virtual assistant on how to follow the system.
4. Set up Start-of-Day and End-of-Day Updates
The last thing that you need to help your virtual assistant with in providing what they need is setting up the start and end of day updates. The start-of-day updates is essentially having your virtual assistant send you at the start of the day, their top 3 priority tasks. The end-of-day updates is having your virtual assistant send you at the end of the day, an update where they are with their priority tasks of the day, if they have finished it or not, and what other tasks they were able to do and finish outside of their priority tasks. Having these updates is a good way for you to see if things are on track and if they are moving forward as they should be.
2ND WEEK: SETTING UP A GOOD DELEGATION SYSTEM
This is going to be very essential as you start working closely together with your virtual assistant. With the delegation system, these are the steps that you can follow to set this up in the right way:
1. Choose how to give them tasks
This could be through text, chat, email or through voice communication. You can choose different tools online like otter, slack, messenger, etc. Whichever is convenient for you and your virtual assistant to use. You must make sure that there is a way for you to easily give your virtual assistant tasks without having to stress about it.
A lot of the time, as employers, we could be rushing from one thing to the other, we think of a task and sometimes forget to actually delegate it. So, make it easy for yourself to be able to give your virtual assistant a task. You need to have one place where you can put in the tasks and your VA can easily grab them without having to go through different tools and platforms.
2. Walk your assistant through the process
Make sure that you walk your assistant through the process of taking things from the chat or voicemail to the actual task list and task tracker. You must ensure that your virtual assistant knows the entire process, so things don’t fall through the cracks.
3. Keep in mind WOW
If you’re wondering what this is about, WOW means Why, Outcome, Who. These are the three things that you have to keep in mind when you’re delegating something to someone.
WHY – Why is this a task? Why is this needed? Why is this the solution to the problem? This is important as you are giving your virtual assistant context about the task.
OUTCOME – How can your virtual assistant say that a task is done or how can they judge that the expected outcome of the task has been met.
WHO – Who is the person in charge.
Following this is the easiest way that you can have a good framework to delegate tasks effectively to your virtual assistant.
3RD WEEK: THEY KNOW THEIR ROUTINE AND RECURRING TASK
Routine tasks are tasks that have some sort of trigger. An example of this is onboarding an employee. The trigger is that someone needs to be hired, then there are a series of routine tasks that needs to be done before you can say that that person is onboarded.
Recurring tasks are repeat tasks daily, weekly, monthly that your virtual assistants need to do and make sure gets done. Examples of this could be email or calendar management, making and sending out reports, or complying business or government requirements. You need to create that list with your assistant and list out these repeatable tasks in your business so they can be easily delegated.
4TH WEEK: LOOKING AND ASSESSING TASKS
On this week, you are basically going to correlate what has been happening in the last few weeks and if your virtual assistant were effective with the tasks they were doing, or if they were struggling. You should also give your virtual assistant feedback on how they were doing and what needs to be improved on moving forward to the next month.
In this phase, it is also an assessment for you to look at how your last couple of weeks has been and if there were tasks that you’ve been wishing to give to your virtual assistant that you still have not. It’s a good time to assess and look if the work dynamic between you and your virtual assistant is working or not, and if this is something that you want to keep moving forward.
Having that good 30-day mark makes it easy for you and virtual assistant to reassess, pivot as needed, to do different ways of delegating if the old one doesn’t work for both of you.
Onboarding a new virtual assistant doesn’t need to be this scary and complicated thing. You also have to keep in mind that if its scary for you, for them it’s very terrifying as well because they are learning all these new things as they are working on it actively. So, make it just a little bit easier for your virtual assistant and yourself and not focus on big results on the first month because that’s just not realistic and not fair to your virtual assistant either.