Establishing Effective Virtual Communication With Your Assistants

Francis:

As I’ve said before, it is very important especially at the beginning to have daily communication. Not necessarily from you to your assistant but from your assistant to you. In other words, he writes you daily emails or makes a presentation or he calls you and you take time, when you have the time, to respond to all his emails. 

The most efficient way for you to talk to your assistant, in my opinion, is video recording. If you make video screen recording, you can in a very fast way, tackle a lot of different subjects without needing to explain what you’re talking about because the assistant can see what you’re talking about. 

If it’s a designer job, you open your screen recording, point to what you like and what you don’t like. And as you talk, you open a new window – open Google, research something. Show how you would research and ask him to really closely review the videos and learn from that. 

And while you talk about when you will be available and how is he doing and what you like and what you don’t like. At the same time you open a window, you show him stuff; you show him a tool; you show him a forum where he can research and tell him, “Open an account and asks questions there. I have made great experience with this forum, for example.”

Or at the same time you have the video running, you put an E-book for the first training into the Dropbox and tell him he can find them in the Dropbox and please review it for 3 hours. This E-book will answer all your questions.

This will keep the time you need to interact with micro-managing his work to minimum. And from all the feedback I received from my assistants, they all loved video recordings. 

Stefan:

Okay. I don’t have the experience with how others think about video recording. But when I have video recording then I see, for example, I have a problem and I go to YouTube find the tutorial for something.

I’m very annoyed by people who are talking about something and they take 2 or 3 minutes by showing me this is a browser and you go there, and then click on it. Then you open it and you drag it to your screen and then you read it. Really stupid stuff… 

Francis:

Yeah. For you, it’s stupid. For someone else, it’s perhaps very useful.

Stefan:

But the very important stuff is only like 2 seconds and they skip it which is very nerve wrecking for me because I have to analyze what did he do, how did he do that? Because they skipped like 2 minutes and then he’s like what is he doing?

Then I go back and the very important stuff was 10 seconds and the other important stuff. So I want to prevent that from doing that myself when I’m doing, as you proposed, video recording.

Francis:

Yes.

Stefan:

How did I “Don’t do that mistake”?

Francis:

Since you don’t record a video to post to YouTube to get many views, you don’t do that for that reason.

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

But you can do it. You can publish your video right after sending it to your assistant and create some content this way if you want. But you are doing the video for the sole reason of training your assistant, so do the video as it feels natural to you.

Don’t force yourself to do it a different way than you would do it naturally. But ask in the video as you talk tell him, “Whenever there’s something unclear in this video, let me know.” 

Then adapt your style of video recording to whatever your assistant feedbacks to you. If for example he says, “Yeah, I know what a browser is and please don’t tell me to click on things. I will figure that out.” Then you make it easier. 

If you send him a recording and, for example, you open a window and say, “Yeah, you just login to your WordPress dashboard then you show the published post and you SEO optimize them.”

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

Then your assistant says, “What’s a dashboard?” Then, you know to make your video simpler. Then you say, “Yeah, you click on this URL (you do it). Then here is the login button. Here you find the dashboard. Here you find the published post. Here you find the draft post, etc.” Then, you know you had to go back and back simpler.

In my opinion, start out talking like you would talk normally and then adapt your video presentations based on the feedback of your assistant on if you make it difficult or less difficult.

If your assistant doesn’t tell you clearly, this is not understandable; you will find that out automatically if you can implement your instructions or not. If you cannot implement it then it’s clear he hasn’t understood it. 

If you explain more simple than he needs it then you cannot know. Then you need his feedback and he has to tell you, “Yeah, you can make it more complicated.”

But if you repeat something 2 or 3 times then on the second video, you don’t have to explain “Here’s the dashboard from WordPress, etc.” anymore. You can just say, “Yeah, review the last video if you don’t know how to do it.” Have them keep and review the videos until they know it. 

Stefan:

Yes.

Francis:

The idea is to record one time on your end as an employer and the employee has to review the video as often as needed until they are able to ask questions or ask for clarifications or simplifications.

Your job is done once when you do 1 video. The assistant’s job is done when they have implemented the work or given you feedback that they need more instructions. Then, the next video comes.