Category: Managing Your Online Team

What is a Virtual Assistant?

A Virtual Assistant (VA) is someone who will help you run your business or help you handle your personal tasks while you focus on your business, things like sending flowers, cards, or ordering you an Uber. A Virtual Assistant could do just about anything. We are all busy, and that trend will only increase as time goes on.

What’s wrong with asking for help now and then? That is what a Virtual Assistant is there for, be it through a one-time contract or long term.

While a virtual assistant can handle various tasks, there is a certain limit as to what they can legally do, much like a physical assistant, there are limitations, and more often than not, a virtual assistant cannot take the place of an employee.

However, a virtual assistant can take some tasks that other employees would be doing in order to even out the spread of the workload, helping ensure that those employees can focus on the growth of the business instead of focusing on smaller tasks. This article will discuss the benefits of having a Virtual Assistant:

ONLINE MANAGEMENT

A virtual assistant can handle the groundwork of researching for your business, brand, or start-up, saving many hours’ worth of time and energy.

Scanning the business environment for potential investors and various other necessities, such as line items and office space, all while running a business by yourself, would be extremely challenging, which is why having an extra set of hands sharing the workload while you focus on other matters is very helpful.

However, a virtual assistant’s online responsibilities can extend further than doing research; they can handle making blog posts, ghostwriting, and editing to maintain the flow of content on your site.

Maintaining a steady stream of content can be an excellent method to grow an online presence, the more content means the chances of one of your articles being found by someone in a search engine, who would then click on the page for further information. This task, however, can be quite large; thus, it may be prudent to have a dedicated ghostwriter or content creator.

ORGANIZE SCHEDULE AND FILES

Akin to a regular assistant, virtual assistants can also handle all scheduling tasks. From organizing a calendar, making daily itineraries, or scheduling meetings, a virtual assistant can handle the minute details to keep your day organized while you can focus on your work, ensuring that you can make the most out of your day to accomplish as much as possible.

In addition to this, a virtual assistant can also book flights, reserve cars, arrange pickups, and book hotels on your behalf, freeing up large sections of time, especially if you do plenty of traveling, spend plenty of time in transit, and already have accommodations ready for you once you arrive at your destination.

Apart from work, a virtual assistant can help you maintain various daily tasks of your personal life, such as scheduling doctor’s appointments, sending gifts, and answering phone calls, on your behalf. Greatly removing some stress from your day-to-day life.

DATABASE MANAGEMENT

Compiling, creating, editing, and maintaining an entire database of clients is a very large task, not to mention very time-consuming. Having your virtual assistant handle tasks such as these would save large sections of time, making sure that the database of clients, contacts, customers, inventory, email addresses, and various business leads remains organized, and that no irrelevant data is left behind.

Keeping your database organized will help save time and effort when trying to find a particular file or customer record.

MAKING POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS

A virtual assistant can even help you make PowerPoint presentations, taking raw data from their research and translating it into more understandable PowerPoints, easing your decision-making process.

This links back to the first benefit of having a virtual assistant, they can do plenty with this information, compiling research and plotting competition, goals, and market share, into an understandable presentation that you could share with potential investors, clients, or your own team.

FREE YOUR SCHEDULE

Running a business can be equal parts exhausting and stressful, so when you have a virtual assistant, you can have them focus on the more tedious tasks so that you can free up some time on your schedule for some much-needed rest. Some time away from all the stresses of work does a mind and body well, giving you a refreshed and renewed perspective on different topics, or just have you rejuvenated to take on another busy workload.

These have been just a few of the many benefits of having a virtual assistant; their capabilities and proficiencies will surely be a great boon to any company or organization, assisting in making them more efficient, laying various groundwork, and allowing one to focus on other matters.

According to a study done by Gallup in 1995, only 9% of the global workforce believed in working remotely. However, presently, that statistic has increased four times its rate to a whopping 37%. Employees and employers alike are starting to see the benefits of working remotely and are enjoying it fully.

However, remote staffing isn’t just a trend; it is slowly becoming a marketable HR benefit used by visionaries to recognize the benefits of remote work for both organizations and their workers. While remote working does not require face-to-face engagement between clients and employees, meeting remote workers once in a while, face-to-face, is proven to help build a stronger working relationship among team players in an organization.

Now, the big question is, can teams of remote staff create and sustain the outcomes-based drive to escalate company success?  Is it really important for clients to extend an effort and meet their remote staff face to face?

Investing in a face-to-face meeting with a remote team once or twice a year will do the business well. Not only is this important to build a harmonious working relationship among the team, but this will also make a company’s remote staff feel like they’re valued and are an important part of the business structure and success, which will eventually translate to a more productive team of remote workers. These kinds of face-to-face meetings are important in ensuring employee engagement.

The word “engagement” is very subjective and almost impossible to define. It means more than having these remote workers finish tasks assigned, or having them speak up their opinions. Engagement means more than the team interacting with each other. What is sure, though, is that engagement doesn’t just happen like magic. It needs extra effort from both the business owner and his or her employees’ end. It requires management. It requires attention.

Meeting remote staff face-to-face helps them develop their strengths and encourages them to be of help to their other team members. It develops skilled employees who can sustain a strong team that is aligned to the company goals. Also, meeting remote employees face-to-face helps businesses assess their overall health. During sessions like these, a team is put together to identify the top focus areas and get everyone involved on mini-task forces to work on resolving business issues and then provide an update on resolving the issues.

Nowadays, there is this term called “workcation”. It is a face-to-face meeting with the remote staff wherein even when everyone is “working”, everyone is also very relaxed and is in a vacation-like environment.

We are proud to announce our partnership with Running Remote, the first of its kind conference which focuses exclusively on making remote working effective.

Take your team to the beautiful paradise island of Bali in Indonesia to learn from industry experts who have built international remote working teams.

If you’re running a remote team or serious about starting one, this is the conference for you. The Running Remote Conference, 23-24 June 2018, is carefully curated to teach you next-level, actionable strategies and tactics you can utilize the very next day to manage & grow your remote team. Learn to build & scale your remote team with leaders from Buffer, Doist, FlexJobs, Transferwise, GitHub, GitLab, Dribbble, Time Doctor, Coworkation, and many others. This is the world’s largest conference laser-focused on Remote Work. Over 250 attendees from all over the world will fly into an amazing setting of tropical Bali – an island in Indonesia.

They will cover every facet of building a remote team to help develop the future of work. Leading remote work tech companies, online collaboration thought leaders, and outsourcing business owners under one roof.

The Running Remote Conference is taking place 25 minutes southwest of Ubud, a town in the central part of Bali. Ubud is approx. 1.5 hours away from the airport and is 600m above sea level, making the temperatures cooler here than in other parts of the island. Discover the rainforest and authentic Balinese culture in Ubud, 40 mins away from the coast.

Their fascinating bamboo venue called Green School Bali boasts a capacity of up to 500 attendees and is spread over 7 hectares in beautiful rural countryside.

There was a time when remote working was only reserved for a limited few. These days, it has grown into a business concept embraced by many international companies; the kind of strategy that you should also be considering if you want to grow your business in an efficient and effective manner. (more…)