subject: Establish A Good Relationship With Your Virtual Assistant [print this page] While having employees off-site saves you from daily annoyance of dealing with employee issues in your workplace, it doesn't mean that you can completely ignore your virtual assistants or not provide them with an orientation. You still need to iron out the details of your relationship with the virtual assistant but the good thing with having a VA is that once all the details are ironed out and you already have a good relationship with your virtual assistant you no longer need to spend as much time monitoring the VA's work. You also do not have to stress about how the VA works to get to the desired outcome. Your only concern would be the kind of work the VA does for you. You do not have to worry about the details of the job including the hours your VA is working, where you're VA works, and even what computer your VA uses.
* Give clear instructions- this is very important whether or not the person you are assigning tasks to is in your office or not. Make sure that you give out clear instructions to your workers so that they know what you want to happen. Explain expectations, set clear deadlines and be clear about how you want things done.
* Be willing to let go- once you assign a task to a virtual assistant, you need to believe that the person can do a great job at the task assigned. One of the benefits of hiring a VA is that they require very little supervision. This means that you can assign tasks to them and then focus your time and energy on the other tasks that need your attention. Letting go can be a tough thing to do when you have been so used to doing everything on your own but you also need to learn to allow others to do their job and not stress out so much about the whole process.
* Provide time for learning- most virtual assistants are already skilled professionals by the time they begin working as virtual assistants. This is the reason why they can really provide you with good services. But you still need to provide your worker with ample time to learn your systems and your methods.
* Keep communication channels open- make sure that your virtual assistant can easily reach you when he/she has questions about the task. You also need to make sure that you have different ways to reach the virtual assistant should you have additional instructions or tasks for him/her.
