subject: What to Do with Your VA When Outsourcing to India [print this page] You've successfully vetted several applicants and hired your first virtual assistant. You're starting on the exciting journey of outsourcing to India.
On your first day of work together, you set up your headset and camera to speak to your virtual assistant and it hits you, "Now what?" How do you begin handling your VA?
First off, you should spend some time with your virtual assistant. This doesn't mean chatting the whole day, but the investment of time checking up to make sure that mistakes don't have to be repeated at the day's end. This is the time that you should be training your assistant to do the work the way YOU want it done.
Each person likes to work in a certain way. So while you may be used to doing something in one way, your virtual assistant may have been trained by a previous boss to complete an assignment in a perfectly different way. Specify what you want done, how to do it, and how they should go about it.
Will this assistant be writing your letters for you? If you have a signature font, size, color, or greeting, let your virtual assistant know what you want used. Otherwise, you may just need to get everything done over again.
Is there also a certain way that you would want information presented? If you need to get a presentation done, for example, you would specify that it should be on PowerPoint, should use this type of template, these certain colors for the background and the fonts, and how many slides, plus what effects and pictures would be suitable. if you could create a master slide that they would just fill up, all the better,
Does it sound too obsessive? Yes, maybe, until you consider that this person is several hundred thousand miles away and also understands things differently. You need these specifics to make sure the job gets done right.
