5 Hacks to Increase Your Virtual Assistant’s Productivity
Productivity has always been a concern among companies all over the world, and we know that 2020 was a decisive year for most companies and part of the survival strategy for many of them was to reinvent their way of doing business.
Many of them that mainly operated onsite began to develop new strategies for remote work; now relying on new systems for both the company and the personnel.
Productivity and Remote Teams
It is common to have difficulties in maintaining the same productivity working with remote teams; but with their business having made it through 2020 and all its reinventions, people realized that maintaining a good level of productivity is completely achievable with their remote team.
Even so, we are human and can adapt after a certain time. But, that does not necessarily mean there is a good level of productivity. It just means that we have adapted to the new systems.
A proof of this is the virtual assistant. At the beginning of each new connection, there is a period in which they and their clients get to know each other and adapt accordingly. However, there are times when this plateaus and it is difficult to move forward.
With this in mind, we would like to share some hacks that will help you break through stagnations and develop greater productivity with your virtual assistant.
#1 Weekly Meetings Improve Productivity
Planning is the most important part. It is very difficult to truly measure whether work is delivering results without SMART objectives. You must learn to set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound objectives with your virtual assistant. Otherwise, you will be going in circles with no direction at all.
Ideally, you should hold one or two weekly meetings: one to plan the activities for the week and a second to review the results. Having more than two meetings a week takes time away from your assistant to efficiently work on the tasks.
#2 Task Manager
Having everything planned out and detailed is important so that your VAs are equipped with tools that help them manage tasks appropriately, according to their importance and urgency.
It is crucial that when you meet, you can discuss priorities; if possible, use the Eisenhower matrix to organize the tasks of the week efficiently. When these are properly organized, your VA can get to work.
If there seems to be too much time wasted, your VA should take notes of the meetings including the plan for each week, the tasks to be done, and the priority. This organizes their workflow; each day they can check their task manager and review what needs to be done.
#3 Monitor Progress of Productivity
When using job management tools based on the Kanban model, constant monitoring of task progress can be done. Use dashboards to assign tasks, specify the progress and completion of tasks. If it is only you and your VA, you both should have access to the tool and while your VA is uploading the information, you can be checking the progress of each task daily, during the week, or however you have set this point for your strategy.
#4 Reduce Distractions
One of the best ways to focus on work is to have tools that help your VA work according to the Pomodoro technique; this helps your VA to focus on a task for 25 min followed by a 5 min break doing it as many times as necessary to accomplish a task. Some tasks will take longer than others, like when your VA is writing a blog post, depending on the topic and the research they need to do; it may take 2 or 3 tracking sessions using the Pomodoro technique.
Another way to decrease distractions for your VA is to have a time tracking tool.
Time Doctor, for example, takes care of sending notifications when the person has been inactive or has been spending a lot of time on non-work-related webpages.
#5 Feedback
After having taken into account the week’s strategies, the tasks to fulfill your objectives, the monitoring, and the reduction of distractions, it is very important to have a feedback meeting with your virtual assistant to discuss the results obtained with the implemented strategies. If these do not show progress towards the fulfillment of your objectives, then clearly they must be modified.
Feedback is not only useful for tracking results with your virtual assistant, but also to find out how they feel about the process; if there are any ways they see that the process can be improved and in this way build a solid team that is moving towards achieving the objectives.
Always remember that the results in a business are a reflection of the quality of the relationships that the members of the company have.
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