5 Essential Tools for Working With a Virtual Assistant

Remote work can sometimes be a challenge for many people who have not worked in this mode before and are wondering how they can make their work and their team’s work more productive.

Well, there are many tools and applications on the market that can help you manage your team’s work more efficiently, either you need to manage a project, collaborate with others, design, brainstorm, monitoring, or any other activity you need to cover, there is a tool for that.

Here we will share 5 of them that user-friendly and if you are just starting out but can’t afford to lose track of tasks done efficiently.

Asana

It is a collaborative project management tool in which you can work with your team to organize pending, in-progress, and completed tasks.

Each project can be displayed as a list or dashboard and you can do the following:

– Create tasks and assign them to specific project members with a deadline and priority type.
– Each task can have a detailed description and sub-tasks if necessary.
– Your virtual assistant can review pending tasks here and upload files directly from Google Drive so you can check the word and excel files, or even the designs she/he is working on.
– Give feedback on work in progress or delivered: each task has the option to leave comments. Here you can give feedback on the designs or versions of writings for a blog post, for example.
– Upload links related to the task to guide your virtual assistant regarding the details of this task.
– If you use the free version of Asana, you can use the “like” icon to indicate that the task is approved.

In this and many other ways, you can use a tool that facilitates the work with your virtual assistant or other members of your team. Let’s say your assistant is a content writer and you have a graphic designer working on the same task, both can communicate easily and coordinate the details to complete the tasks more efficiently.

Google Drive

Already many Google users enjoy Google Drive with their personal emails, but Google Drive can also be a powerful tool for your business if used correctly.

Let’s say you can work with your virtual assistant by giving her your business email credentials and on the drive, she can save all the respective files to the company in a safe and easy way to review.

Google Drive for individuals has a 15GB storage, you can use different types of files that are the versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, also you can create forms, among many options given by Google.

So with Google Drive you not only have space to save files but to create them directly in the cloud and work together with your virtual assistant.

Zoom

A few years ago the most common thing to use in messaging and video call mode was Skype, but this year with the increase in demand for live streaming services, Zoom became more popular than ever because it delivered what the whole world asked for.

Zoom is a platform that has been on the market for some time and offers a live streaming service. You can make everything from video calls with one person to conferences for thousands of people.

If you access the free version you can hold a meeting with one person for an unlimited time, also for all versions you can share your screen and request remote control of the screen of the person who shares.

You can coordinate weekly or daily meetings with your virtual assistant and add them to your calendar.

Slack

Slack is one of the tools that has been around the longest and is frequently used by remote teams.

It is basically a tool to maintain real-time communication between teams of all sizes. Team members log in via email and maintain chats on projects created for that team.

This tool can be used to:

– Replace emails, text messages, phone calls, and WhatsApp, (which can be a distracting agent in the middle of work).
– Save files and review chat history for easy access.
– Attend to urgent matters taking advantage of the possibility of working in real-time, as well as brainstorming.
– Create reminders for you and your virtual assistant or remote team about important events such as a meeting.
– Know the availability status of your virtual assistant (although we will dive into this point with the following tool).

Time Doctor

It is a time and productivity monitoring tool.

It’s one of the most used tools to work with remote teams since it helps to maintain a more defined supervision of the work that your team or your virtual assistant is doing.

Time Doctor takes care of:

– Taking screenshots at specified times to monitor what your virtual assistant is doing, reducing distractions or inefficiencies.
– Delivering daily and weekly reports with the hours, websites, applications, and tasks that your virtual assistant has been doing. Your assistant will also receive this report and will be able to correct any behavior that is affecting her/his productivity.
– Register the time spent on each website and if your virtual assistant is spending more time on Facebook than she should, you will know.
– And if your virtual assistant is spending a lot of time on a web page that is not assigned within working hours, she will receive a pop-up as a warning asking “Are you still working?”
– Keep track of the breaks your virtual assistant takes.

As you can see, these tools are fundamental for the development of good work with your virtual assistant and also helps you to keep a record and do a follow up so you can reach your goals.

Have you decided to hire a virtual assistant yet? Do you have any questions?

Today you can schedule a strategic call with Claudia to discuss the tasks you need to outsource for a better performance of your business!