Working with a remote team can be intimidating, especially for a startup or small/medium-sized enterprise (SME). However, with the right approach and a reliable Magic virtual assistant, you can definitely focus on getting things done.
Delegating minor tasks to your VA allows you to prioritize more challenging ones, so you can reach your business goals sooner rather than later. Here are ten tips to improve your remote work management, so you can hit your targets.
1. Use the Right Tools
Working remotely has its own set of challenges, including how to ensure that you can easily manage tasks and collaborate with your Magic assistant. However, by using the right remote work tools like Slack and G-Suite, you can organize your tasks and projects.
In addition to this, you can assign a VA to your sales team to collaborate on a project and be productive as a whole despite working in different locations and time zones.
2. Collaboration is Key to Success
For a business owner and a Magic Virtual Assistant, collaboration is the key to attaining success. A Stanford study found that 64% of people are better motivated to face difficult tasks when they perceive they’re working with others on them. They also showed higher levels of engagement and lower signs of fatigue.
These results indicate that using collaboration software to create a visible culture of cooperation could boost worker performance — especially, perhaps, for those whose work is fully remote, like VAs. The Gartner Digital Worker Survey 2021 found that 80% of workers utilized collaboration tools for work.
3. Acknowledge Diversity and Cultural Differences
Employing virtual assistants often means adapting to a multicultural work setting. Without proper preparation, this could lead to misunderstandings or even conflict.
To avoid this, you must encourage feedback to be given constructively and promote rapport and team building by embracing diversity and cultural differences. These should enable your Magic Virtual Assistants to work together and accomplish tasks more efficiently.
4. Promote Transparency at Work
Remote virtual assistants have great freedom to get work done, but business owners often worry about correctly tracking their output. To eliminate this lack of visibility, promote transparency and accountability for duties and tasks.
Here are other ways you can facilitate and encourage transparency in your virtual working environment:
- Set clearly defined roles and responsibilities
- Discuss with team members. Clarify short and long-term business goals and who’s accountable for specific outcomes in each project
- Provide a copy of the working schedule, holidays, meetings, and ground to everyone concerned
- Track the key metrics of the project and share the results with the team
5. Foster Open Communication With Each Other
Fostering open communication enables team members to connect and understand each other better including their work ethics and what makes them tick.
Better understanding also allows you to assign tasks to Magic Virtual Assistants who are a better fit for those tasks. This then promotes efficiency and effectiveness, especially if you’re delegating to more than one virtual assistant.
Customize Your Virtual Team Based on Your Needs
6. Consider Time Zones
Working in different time zones can present problems, especially if there’s a lack of communication. To solve this, schedule meetings a few days before to give everyone enough time to prepare for them including setting up voice or video calls.
Clarify the time by providing both time zones as well. With good communication, you and your Magic Virtual Assistant can learn and earn the trust of each other and have more confidence in each other’s work.
7. Build Team Bonds
Virtual work setup isn’t conducive for face-to-face interaction and gatherings outside of work. So, for SME and startup owners, you must be more conscious of this and work on having activities that promote team bonding.
A Gallup survey showed that feelings of isolation can decrease an employee’s productivity by 21%. Working remotely can also lead to burnout. Sponsoring an event to foster team building for your remote team and Magic Virtual Assistant is a worthwhile expense.
When your employees feel connected with everyone on the team, they work better together. They are also better motivated to reach the goals assigned to their team, say, increase sales by 10% every quarter.
Here are some suggestions on how you can build team bonding:
- Annual get-together: Strive to hold a retreat or get together once a year to boost team bonding. This is a great way to de-stress and create friendships among remote workers and Magic Virtual Assistants. Do team-building activities that you can’t do during virtual meetings.
- Catch-up meeting: Your virtual assistants are still human beings. So, encourage them to have catch-up meetings intended to build camaraderie and team building. This can be a way to break the boredom and tedious work, especially after a particularly busy time.
- Celebrate Victories: Everyone understands that it’s impossible to meet and celebrate victories regularly. However, you can show appreciation for their big and small achievements and successes to boost employee morale in other ways. Sending personalized items like scented candles or a gift check they can use to buy something they want online are great examples.
8. Set Boundaries and Expectations
Set boundaries with virtual assistants so they know what they can or cannot do. Setting the right expectations as well, so they know what standards they’ll be evaluated against.
For example, you can expect your virtual assistants to respond to queries and emails during their working schedule and not after. This sets boundaries in personal and work life. For VAs working in different time zones, this also takes away conflicts with their sleep or family time.
On the whole, you can build positive relationships with your remote team by respecting each other’s time. Plus, they come to work refreshed and ready to accomplish their tasks.
9. Provide Work Incentives
Offering incentives like giving gift checks or cash as a reward to your Magic Virtual Assistant for accomplished goals or target results encourages better performance from them. What’s more, celebrating milestones or victories makes great work incentives you can consider.
Just remember to set realistic and achievable goals to encourage your virtual workers to succeed. So set a sales target of, say, a 20% increase for this quarter’s sales metrics. If your remote team achieves this target sale, reward them with remotely available incentives, such as vouchers or gift checks.
10. Give Help When Needed
Since you don’t see your virtual assistants regularly, you won’t know if they need your help unless they tell you or ask for your help directly. Be alert for signs of bothered or sick VAs.
After all, happy employees would want to work harder and while VAs may not be your employees, high morale will still help them work better. In turn, this will produce better results for your business.
Communicating to let VAs know when they can reach you goes a long way toward building trust. You should expect lesser problems and faster completion of assigned tasks if you or the person in charge has their back in case of emergencies.
What is a Magic Assistant?
A Magic Virtual Assistant provides executive and administrative assistance to startups and SMEs. They can also do data work and general research. If you need virtual assistants adept at sales and customer support, Magic has that covered for you as well.
You can even build a team of two or more Magic Virtual Assistants for your business. Fill in work gaps and easily scale up or down depending on your business needs! This will allow you to save further on costs and boost your productivity.
What Should I Look For To Build An Effective Remote Team?
Here are five characteristics to look for when searching to hire virtual assistants so your remote team works:
Initiative
Some people naturally find meaningful tasks to do when there are no tasks assigned or when all assigned tasks are completed.
Virtual assistants who do extra work without being told, or make decisions without waiting for an answer can provide great results for your business. If trained properly, they can be like well-oiled machines that man your departments and get good results for your business.
During the interview process, you can ask about instances when the interviewee used some initiative to get things done. Or ask them what they know about your company. Their answers can show if they have initiative or lack thereof.
Focus
Startups and SMEs often get bombarded with a lot of things while venturing into campaigns, activities, and marketing launches. A virtual assistant can prioritize tasks for your business so you can get things done and proceed faster.
You should see if your prospective virtual assistant is focused by answering questions directly. Being able to ignore distractions and showing readiness and alertness when interrupted during the interview are also great indicators of being able to focus on the task at hand.
Proficiency In Writing
Working in a virtual office, communicating with other team members via writing is the most effective way to organize tasks, goals, and projects. Communicating tasks, reports, and other correspondence in a clear, concise, and tactful way goes a long way to enhancing good relationships with other co-workers.
This can be easily checked as early as the submission of the application and email responses. Feel free to check further if you want by giving a writing task during the first week at work.
Ability to work alone and/or team player
Magic Virtual Assistants are flexible in this aspect. They can work alone with no or minimal supervision and still accomplish their data entry jobs or assignments.
However, in case there are new collaborative endeavors you assign to a particular team for the first time, try to keep tabs on how things are progressing. Allow them time to assess and correct issues themselves if time permits. Either way, your Magic Virtual Assistant can work alone and with a team whenever the need arises.
Trustworthy
Trust is vital, especially since you can’t meet your virtual assistants. To foster a working relationship with trust between team members empowers you to believe that each member will do well to achieve your goals and achieve success for your business growth as well.
To discover if your prospective virtual assistant is trustworthy, you can ask them to relate a work incident when they were honest even though they may be reprimanded or fired. Not to mention confirm if your initial impression of this virtual assistant is right or wrong.
Furthermore, over the course of your VA working with you, you’ll be able to decide whether to trust them or not. If your working relationship with a Magic Virtual Assistant no longer works for you, we can find a replacement that better fits your standards.
How Do You Choose The Right Magic Assistant For Me?
Magic matches each client with the right virtual assistant. Our Magic Virtual Assistant hiring process consists of these stages:
- Discovery Call: This call is done to know your business and virtual assistant requirements.
- Matching: Magic screens candidates most suited to your requirements.
- Candidate Selection: We give you a list of shortlisted candidates to choose from.
- Introductory Call: Once you’ve chosen, we set an appointment for both you and your chosen candidates so you can talk to them and make your decision on who to hire. If no candidate was selected, we’ll give another list of candidates for you until you find the VA you’re looking for.
- Onboarding: After confirming your choice, we proceed with onboarding your hired Magic virtual assistant. This way, your VA can start as soon as you need them.
For your administrative virtual assistant services and more, feel free to talk with us to get started. Find out what Magic can do for you and your business!
Match With a Vetted Virtual Assistant in 72 Hours!
