subject: Virtual Personal Assistant - How To Enhance Communication Today [print this page] Basecamp is a very useful tool and this is how we manage different virtual personal assistant in our online Melbourne SEO business. We have a lot of issues when you're emailing backward and forward as to who said what, what got said, especially when you start to build a bigger team. We have an internal office assistant who chats with the virtual assistants every day. Let's say if Meagan chats with an assistant and says something and then Andrea chats to an assistant and says something, there needs to be a central meeting place so everybody knows what's been said. So we use Basecamp for that.
Everybody gets their own log in, we assign different tasks to different things that need to be done under Basecamp and then all of it is done. It is almost like a message board. All it is, it is an online place for you to collaborate where you can upload files, but we don't use it so much for the uploading files, it's more for the central communication to make sure that, when Meagan is away, Andrea knows exactly what's going on. When someone else is away, I can log in and make sure I know exactly where the different assistants are up to. So Basecamp is the one that we use for that. There are a few other solutions and there is a free one. Then Skype, Skype is a critical component as well in becoming a virtual assistant today.
I was getting too busy managing all of the different internet entrepreneur and assistants and that's when I looked to get people into the office. Andrea is like an assistants' supervisor. So she manages all of the assistants. She does the daily checking with them, chats with them on the phone in the morning. We've got a separate room out the back where she goes, hops on the mike, has a chat with them, talks through their end of day email, says how are you going, any questions, any issues, ok, what is the plan for today? So that gets done every day. I like that everyday contact because that's what connects your virtual personal assistant to you. When you're working in a virtual environment, unless you're making that personal contact, it's too easy for them to separate and not feel like they're a part of your business. So that's a really key thing to make sure everybody gets chatted with everyday.
Meagan is more of the project manager now. She used to work with the internet marketing assistants but now she manages the office and makes sure that Andrea has what she needs and Meagan will get conceptually in her head, ok, here are the different things that we're working on like google local and then makes sure that that gets passed on to Andrea who then makes sure that gets pushed through to the different assistants.
My suggestion for hiring virtual personal assistant in your office, especially for project management and supervisory type roles: hire Mums, they're stable, they've had their kids, a lot of them aren't looking to climb up the corporate ladder at this point of time, it's more of a lifestyle thing.
