Communication in business with Virtual Assistants: Learn from behind the scenes of two employers outsourcing their work to overseas Virtual Assistants!
Communication in Business
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Using Trello as a project management system with your virtual assistants
Trello is a project management online application where you can manage different tasks assigned to your virtual assistant or a team of VAs. After using other project and employee management applications and comparing them with Trello, we found it better than other applications like Asana. Using Trello is especially great if you have a flexible team of virtual assistants. This is how it looks for us:
Here are some of the major reasons why we preferred Trello over Asana.
- Free to use.
- User-friendly – Easy to work with
- Drag and Drop system
- Asana is more complicated than Trello.
- Asana is good for those teams who follow strict deadlines on each task. However, we can still set a deadline within Trello if we want to.
- You can see the complete history of any task within the same task /card
The downside
There is no dashboard where you can see reports and ongoing work progress in Trello, but this is still possible with Trello if you follow the process in a perfect order.
How to best use Trello for managing your virtual assistants
So here is our best suggestions on how you can use Trello as a content management system.
Let’s suppose you’re working with only one virtual assistant at the moment.
Create two boards in Trello.
- Virtual Assistant To-do
- Employer To-to
Virtual Assistant to-do has three lists
- Low priority: You will put all low priority tasks here
- High priority: All high priority tasks can be placed here
- Work in Process: Either VA or employer will move the tasks to this list based on their priorities
Employer to-do has two lists
- To-do: All tasks where your virtual assistant needs any feedback from you, or it’s pending on you will be moved here.
- Pending for validation: After completing any task, the VA will move the card here for your review. So you will review his work and either archive the card if it’s good or re-move to your VA’s boards if something is not finished.
Working mechanism
As mentioned above that you’ll move all of tasks that are supposed to be performed by your virtual assistant, he will move tasks from high priority list to Work in Process list. This will give you an overview of what tasks he is working on at the moment.
When he will finish a task, he will move it either to Pending for Validation or to your to-do list based on its status.
When you have time, you will only have to go to your board and there you will find all the tasks that are pending on your end. When you review those tasks, if the task is done you can archive that. If it’s still not complete, then you can move it back to one of your virtual assistant’s lists.
How to move tasks from one board to another
Moving tasks from one board to another is easy. You need to follow this process:
- Open the task
- From actions click “Move”
- Select the appropriate board
- Select the appropriate list
More amazing Trello features
Here are some more features that we can use in order to use Trello better.
- You can add members to different tasks
- If you check “subscribe” you’ll get notified whenever any changes/updates made to the card.
- There is a checklist feature which allows to bifurcate the task into different steps, so you can use that to create and follow those tasks which have multiple steps
- Every task has all its actions described at the bottom
- You can set due dates to those tasks which have strict deadlines
- For big projects, You can create more boards.
- You can add different labels to different tasks
- You can search tasks within the search bar
Learn How To Outsource With Youtube Marketing Strategy Effectively
YouTube marketing strategy is part-17 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.
Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Summary:
- How to make the YouTube marketing strategy helpful in training your assistants and outsourcing tasks
- Create videos that contains content that will help your outsourcing strategy effectively
- Learn how YouTube videos can help train your virtual assistants
Start of the Interview:
Francis
One other comment regarding YouTube, when you start doing that I would be very happy to learn from you about that because I also think this is one of my many projects in my projects folder.
I think I’m giving my main assistant nightmares with all the projects I’m opening and none that I’m closing.
But I would like also very much like to go into YouTube because I do believe that it is very a targeted traffic and from the right sort of persons. And I know that it’s very useful to have a virtual assistant to fine tune your videos.
And there’s one outsourcing expert, so to say, who’s shared a lot on YouTube already. I’m sending you a link. It’s from a person called Tyrone Shum.
Eric
Yeah, I’ve heard of Tyrone. I’ve seen some of his stuff on this.
Francis
And okay, I didn’t know you knew, but then I would suggest that your assistant should digest all his free information as much as possible because you obviously also have some paid service especially in the direction of video creation.
But if you have basic knowledge about working with virtual assistants, I think it’s more money efficient to train your own team than to pay him for a service. But if you’re not interested in that, then just go ahead and use a specialized service for that.
Eric
Yeah, that’s definitely something that I need to look into. Because I think especially with my medium – teaching piano lessons – that’s definitely something that needs to be more on YouTube because it’s such a visual type of thing. You know what I’m saying.
Francis
Yeah. But I really think when it comes to training your assistant, just let them watch training videos. I think there are lots of how to use YouTube videos on YouTube just as part of the training because I wouldn’t have the patience to watch all these videos if I wasn’t doing the task myself.
Eric
Right, yeah. And that will save us the time to have and actually go out and create the video themselves and making that time to do that too.
Francis
Yeah. Do you have special equipment for your videos? Your quality was much better than mine and you had a big microphone as well.
Eric
Well, at the moment, you see, I used to do some basic audio recordings so I have the microphone that I use for that. And I just use that for my videos. I mean, I just went out and got like a $200 HD camera.
Francis
Okay.
Eric
I went out and bought some lights, just $20 lights that I just saw. And really the qualities of my videos aren’t really that great yet but they’re getting better. But it’s probably only like a couple of hundred dollars and you can get a microphone, a decent HD camera and that’s really all that I have.
Francis
Yeah. That’s also the advice I’ve read often about videos. One advice that I’ve found very good from Tyrone was to just get started. Just do a crappy video first. And then he showed his oldest videos and they were crappy in comparison.
Eric
Because his videos have like explosions and sound effects and stuff like that. And in his first video, he’s like in the trunk in the car or something, really. And then I wanted to follow his advice and I just did that.
I prepared some sort of script and it was evening and I was tired because I watched all these videos but I wanted to get into action. I didn’t want to just read and not do anything.
And then it was dark and I didn’t have the lights installed too well, so I was looking almost green in this video. And I was like looking sleepy and talking slurrish like I was high. And I was recording then a 10 minutes video of myself talking this way. And then I was proud because I took an actionable step, you know.
Francis
And then I put it in the Dropbox and send it to my 2 best friends and my girlfriend. And I cannot tell you how hard they laughed at me. They did not laugh with me, seriously. They made fun of me and hard, really hard.
And I was just trying to explain myself. I was just saying, yeah, I know it’s bad but I just want to take action and the next one will be better. Then they said that was so bad, just don’t do that.
Eric
Let me say one thing though really quick, Francis. I’ve sent you a link to my YouTube channel.
And my videos, some of the first ones that I did – they’re horrible. I mean, I’m serious. And also, I was nervous in front of the camera. I mean I didn’t even have my face in them, it was just my hand. And the way I talk I was ah—ah, you know. I mumbled most of the time and they’re just horrible. So if you ever have a minute, watch some of them.
Francis
But you kept them online, I think that’s charming.
Eric
And if you look at some of them, I’ve got almost 110,000 views on one video.
Francis
Yeah, you have lots of views. I’ve been looking at it. I think in the end, the content is what’s important in the long run.
Eric
Right. And that’s the thing; if you can just get it out there I think that people are a lot more gracious than we think.
I think that even though that we look at it and like oh that’s terrible, that’s horrible, yeah. I mean I think that we want to strive for quality. I think we want to have the best stuff that we can.
But when you’re first starting your business, I think it is better just to get it out there. And I mean, you can see from what I’ve got; I mean they look horrible but I’ve got a lot of views.
And too I mean, it’s different for my stuff because I’m kind of piggybacking off of popular songs. I think that they’re doing a great job but they are horribly, horribly produced.
Francis
Yeah, I agree. But thanks for the heads up because I really sort of lost my motivation with that story because my tools were so bad. And yeah, also I’m aware that the tool I’m using for recording for my webcam has much lower quality than, for example, the recording that comes from Skype.
So obviously technically, I was not set up either. But I’d like to go into that soon also. And for example, for these videos, I will try work with my main assistant first because I will not have enough work for full time and then I give it to someone else.
I also believe before you expand, you have to have some sort of return of interest so some money which comes back into your business.
If you have videos and you create them. And over time, it creates you either direct advertisement income or links back to your services that you get money from. Then you can say, okay, I’m earning hundreds of dollars more a month, why not put them directly into the expansion of my team?
But if you just expand because you have so many ideas, like I am, then you risk just running and burning lots of money.
Eric
Yeah and you’re not getting anything in return on that.
Francis
Yeah, so that’s something to look out for.
Continue reading part 18 – How reliable Google Analytics YouTube tracking for online business?
How To Ask Virtual Assistant Work Revisions Without Compromising Quality
Virtual assistant work revisions is part-3 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Summary:
- Will getting too many revision offers from a virtual assistant give the employer peace of mind?
- Will asking your virtual assistant for work revisions compromise the quality of work and delay your deadline?
- Can hiring a person without seeing him face to face affect the ability to judge the character and compromise your business?
Start of the Interview:
Eric
I worked with virtual assistants from all over the globe. I worked with some from India, from Bulgaria, from Hungary and different places, and I’ve noticed, for the most part, mostly all of them are very eager to want to give me exactly what I want.
They’ll say, “I will give you as many revisions as you want” for a particular thing or they’re just very eager to give me exactly what it is that I wanted.
Francis
Yep. And did you use this offer? For example, they will write an article for you and they tell you, “You can have as many revisions as you want” would you then take them up on the offer or are you just saying okay they’re offering me this and then I’m happy?
Eric
Well, I think it gave me a little more peace of mind. I mean, when I was hiring them. Because, I think, especially, when you’re hiring someone that you don’t see face to face, it’s kind of hard to judge their character or judge the output that they’re going to give you. I think that by them offering that, it just gave me a little more peace of mind.
But, really like the last person that I just hired was somebody to work on a cover of one of my products that I’m going to put out next week and really I didn’t have to ask him for any revisions at all because the quality that he gave me was perfect.
He followed my instructions exactly the way that I wanted him to. And, so I really didn’t even ask him for any revisions at all. So I think it just depends.
But then, there are other times where I’ve asked for 4 or 5 revisions because it wasn’t exactly what I wanted and they freely gave me the revisions that I wanted and didn’t have any problem with me about that.
Francis
Okay. Perhaps, that’s a take away lesson for virtual assistants if you really want to jumpstart the trust between you and your employer offer bonuses like that. Free revisions, going over what is requested and then you are off to a good start.
Eric
But, I think there can be a problem there too. I mean, I know that there are (probably) some employers who could probably take advantage of this in the same extent.
Yeah. I mean, I think that most people that you worked with, if you’re willing to offer that to them and you give them a good product and you worked hard and you follow the instructions exactly as they’re given to you.
I don’t think that they’ll really take advantage of that. I don’t think. But, you know there are still probably some people who will.
Francis
Yeah. I assume that both of us, we have quite strong ethical values or standards. That perhaps it’s inconceivable for us how abusive some employers or wannabe-employers can be.
Or are not really employers, they are just people who gained the system of trust or initial trust of virtual assistants. And gain the fact that there are possibly many and growing more people of also beginner assistants trying to make a name for them and have a lot to lose.
So, I think that is a fact that one cannot ignore when we have to react to some reactions of your virtual assistants. So, for example, they are a little bit withdrawn in the beginning.
Continue reading part 4 – How to encourage virtual assistant feedback and suggestions
Creating A More Efficient Communication Through Virtual Assistant Feedback
Virtual assistant feedback is part-4 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Click here to read part 3 of this interview – How to ask virtual assistant work revisions
Summary:
- How to encourage and get virtual assistant feedback, thoughts and critics to help improve your online business?
- Overnight results seldom exist. Can a trial period break the barriers between you and your virtual assistant?
- Know the difference between expensive and affordable virtual assistants and what roles they play for your business’ success.
Start of the interview:
Francis
Let me give you an example and then I would like to go back to the original question of “how to”, in the beginning, make the communication more efficient.
My main virtual assistant from Pakistan, he always did a good job with his work. But, it took me a long time until I encouraged him enough so that he openly shared with me his thoughts and criticisms.
He’s a super smart guy and I value his input a lot. But, in the beginning, I felt it was kind of hard to get him to talk without holding back a lot. This is even true when he criticizes some of my ideas now.
So, I’m asking openly, if I’m having a stupid idea tell me. And if it is a stupid idea and he tells me, he does it in an extremely polite way, in my view.
I would be fine if he tells me. Because after all these years, I would really be fine if he tells me “Francis, that is stupid. Do something lax.” But that’s perhaps the German in me who was talking 🙂
Eric
Well, no, I’ve noticed the same thing because with my assistant, she was very apprehensive to really give me any of her input on anything. It was pretty much basically follow the instructions, do exactly what I said. But, that’s how we kind of build our relationship.
She’s a little bit more open in giving me ideas and suggestions on different pieces of software used to make things quicker and different things like that.
But, it took a little bit of time to be able to get to that point because I think that’s how any job or anything that we do in life goes.
I think that you’re going to be a little bit more apprehensive to tell your boss, you know, “Hey stupid, you shouldn’t be doing that or you should be doing this instead or whatever”. But I’ve noticed the same thing that you’re saying.
Francis
So, perhaps one has to assume that there is a trial period where the training takes place, the trust building takes place, the communication, payment and systems takes place; and only after that, we can really expect those sort of overnight results.
And, of course, each hour worked is each hour paid. So, this is an additional cost that is not very transparently advertised when someone talks about virtual assistants.
I never have had the experience with professional virtual assistants from the US. So, people who might charge $70 an hour have been really assistants who work as virtual secretaries for big CEO’s from big companies. That does exist.
I would assume that those people are so highly trained that you can expect this sort of overnight professionalism very soon in the start after only a few hours.
But, if in the opposite end you hire someone for $2 or $3 an hour, it wouldn’t be logical or useful or realistic that you have a professional virtual assistant quality after few hours. Because, then they would charge like a professional virtual assistant.
Eric
Right, right. I think in every job or in every role, I think there’s always that time where you have to take that time to be able to train them properly and give them the right tools and the knowledge to what we’re trying to do online.
Continue reading part 5 – How effective is video screen recording in communicating your virtual assistant?
How To Effectively Extract Virtual Assistant Concerns And Questions?
Virtual assistant concerns is part-8 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Summary:
- Ways to effectively channel your virtual assistant concerns and questions: through blog posts or comments.
- How to train your virtual assistant effectively to lighten your workload.
- How to handle and prepare virtual assistants properly from the business owners’ perspective.
Start of the Interview:
Eric
Is your site more geared toward the virtual assistant themselves or is it more geared towards the business owner or what is it about?
Francis
I will try to do both but I’d say that it’s more geared towards the business owners.
Eric
Okay, alright. Just making sure because it seems like that you kind of split between both the business owner and the virtual assistant themselves. And that’s great.
So, I just wasn’t sure if we were talking about it from the perspective of business owner or the assistant themselves trying to work for the person or not or whatever.
Francis
I think it’s important to have both sides. And it’s also important for both parties to look at both sides. So, I have a page, a special tier page, for a virtual assistant with tips for virtual assistants but it’s a sub-page within the page.
But, I do believe that many virtual assistants are visiting my site and are getting some background knowledge on how an employer thinks. So, when they go to their employer—they are prepared.
Ideally, after reading my page, they will make another employer a little bit happier. On the other side, it’s very important to know as an employer what are the simple or complicated fears and questions usually virtual assistant have.
If you don’t know that, then, you will find yourself losing time and money. So, that’s why I feel having sometimes the commentary of my assistant or a blog post written from his perspective is very useful.
Eric
Yeah, definitely it is. Because, as the employer, if you don’t know what the assistants are thinking or what’s going on at their end; it’s hard for us to kind of judge what are the questions that they might have or things that might come up in the future.
Continue reading part 9 – how to share large files with your virtual assistants
Maximize The Effectiveness Of Your Virtual Assistant Communication
Virtual assistant communication is part-1 of an interview with Eric, a fellow entrepreneur interested in outsourcing his work to virtual assistants all over the world.Follow along to learn from our experience on working with VAs!
Summary:
- Effective communication with your virtual assistant can help optimize and expand your business
- The communication barrier between virtual assistant and employer makes or breaks your business
- Learning the proper employer-to-virtual assistant communication habits gets your message across effectively
Start of the Interview:
Eric
One of the things that I was looking at was when you said how you effectively communicate with your assistant.
And, that was something at first I had a little bit of trouble with trying to find a good way to be able to get all of my ideas across to the assistant. And kind of get them on the same page as me and everything. I don’t know if I’m jumping the gun or whatever here but that was one of the things that I saw when I was trying to get optimal.
Francis:
Yeah. This is something I really like to talk about as a subject because I think the communication between the assistant and employer makes or breaks your business.
Eric
Yeah. What I was thinking is that it wasn’t really a language barrier. Because, when I was going in, I thought that I was going to have a lot of issues communicating with someone from the Philippines.
And, I never really noticed that very much. Their English is really good. It was almost just as good as any native speaker that I’ve ever come in contact with.
So, I never really noticed any language barriers. But, as far as I am trying to get them to understand exactly what I was trying to have them do; that’s where some of the difficulties came in.
You know what I’m saying? I have to explain things 1, 2, 3 or 4 times so that they would actually know exactly what it was that I needed them to do.
And a lot of times, I’m just typing it on a Word document or PDF but it wasn’t sufficient enough to make them understand.
The first thing I’ve tried to do was to make screen capture videos and I would upload those to YouTube and try to have them watch those. But, the problem with that was, after sending them the videos and say, I’ve uploaded that at (4 o’clock) my time–it was in the middle of the night for them.
Then, I would let them watch it. And, if there are questions, then, they would have to send it to me and it would be in the middle of the night for me.
So, that would leave us an entire day where they weren’t able to work on it because they were asking questions. And, then, I would send them an answer.
And, if they had any other questions, it would really cause the process to take a long period of time, to really expand and it makes things take a whole lot longer.
The questions going back and forth in the different time zones and everything like that would really cause a lot of problems. You know what I’m saying?
Francis:
Yes, I do. So, at first, this prerequisite on some of your business aspects are time sensitive.
Eric
Yeah, yeah.
Francis:
Do you have some things like, for example, customer relationships? Like someone having a problem – a customer writing. And, then, you have to react fast because else the customer will get angry. Has something like that been an incident? So, that’s the case for you?
Eric
Well, it wasn’t necessarily something like a customer. But, it was just something that you can say you wanted a research done for something that I wanted to work on the next day.
I wanted them to do the research so that It could be ready when I woke up the next morning, something that I could start working on.
Well, I couldn’t start working on it because they were like, “Well, I had a question about this or how do I find the backlinks to that site? What programs should I use or how do I look it up in the software?” You know what I’m saying?
So, there were just these differences on technical things. After they understood what they were supposed to do, they could continue doing it without any problems, but the initial set up in getting them familiar with the process was the first struggle that I faced.
Francis:
So, from my experience of working with my main long term assistant, it does take a while until it gets into this magical overnight mode.
So, if it’s improving perfectly, then you can give your task to your assistant. And, it’s an advantage that we have a different time zone. While you sleep, they work.
And, then you will get the result the next day fresh in the morning. So, that’s like the magical perfection.
Actually, one of my proposed ideas when I tried to come up with a domain name for my site was “Others Work, You Sleep”. I found this funny but it was too long. So, I stayed with Ideal-Helper. But, it’s truly something great when you reach it.
So, obviously, you want to reach that level. But, I do think you should not have the highest expectations at the beginning especially if you have a fresh employee and especially if you haven’t communicated back and forth a lot and there is not enough trust set up yet.
At the moment you haven’t had that frequent communication yet and there’s not the trust-work-relationship set up yet.
Eric
Right. And, especially if it’s a new task, if it’s something that they’ve never done before; it’s hard to – at first, you kind of expect them to be able to do everything. That this one virtual assistant can do everything and anything under the sun when really it’s better to hire different people to do different roles rather than having one person trying to do every single job and every single task for you.
Continue reading part 2 – How to train an administrative virtual assistant to have exceptional and organizational skills
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