How do I work with an offshore VA (Virtual Assistant)?

From timezone differences to language barriers to cultural nuances to simply having someone else working in your business, these are some things that make your VA / boss relationship easy and effective.

Transcript

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Hey Recovering Perfectionist, I'm Claire Riley, and you're listening to episode 81 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Today I am going to talk through how some of the best ways to work with a VA who is remote, especially if your VA is in another country. So we talked about how to hire a VA in episode 66. There's some excellent tips back there if you'd like. And in this one, I'll also link to that so you can head over to clairy.co forward slash pod forward slash 81 to get all of the links and some notes on today. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. So I have been lucky enough to have worked with probably five or six VAs who I've hired mainly through upwork over the last five and a half years in my business as well as in other people's businesses. In fact, probably more like 10 or 12, if I include other VAs as well. And I have pulled together some tips that I think can make your life a lot easier and make their life a lot easier and make your working relationship a lot more cohesive and supportive and helpful. So I just want to just a reminder and cast you back to episode number 66, where I went through the ways and the steps to go through to find an ideal VA and to keep a wonderful VA and all of the steps there. Often, as I mentioned in that episode, it's actually us as the business owner and the manager of that working relationship who's fallen down, and that's why it hasn't quite worked out. So I've put some tips in there to avoid that happening. And so today I won't go into a great deal about that, but if you haven't listened to episode 66, definitely go back and have a listen. It's only 10 or 12 minutes, and there's some hopefully really great tips in there for you. So I really want to talk about this. This is I I've, you know, talk about working with VAs who are offshore, i.e., in another country. But it really goes for working with anyone, whether it's a project person, whether they're in the same state, country, city, uh, wherever they are, but then not necessarily someone who you're sitting next to at a desk with five days a week. There's a very different working dynamic that you need to be aware of, and some certainly some tools and tricks and tips and hacks that can make everyone's life a lot more harmonious and productive. So let's get stuck in. So the first thing that I'm going to just mention, and again, as I said, I've talked about this quite thoroughly in episode 66, is that your person, whether they're a VA, virtual assistant, or whatever sort of role they're in, has a very clear role description and that they know what the expectations are from you, and vice versa, that you know what their expectations and practicalities are. So part of uh recruiting and onboarding is being really clear about turnaround times, times that they are available, times that you expect work to be finished in, and all of that sort of thing. And that is certainly an ongoing process as well. So every time you delegate something in the early days, especially, I like to give very specific time frames and testing, which I'll come to talk about in a moment. But having a really easy place where they know what your expectations are daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, if there's any specific tasks that are done on those sort of time frames, as well as just an overall role description so they know where they fit in the whole business and what is their area, um areas of responsibility and accountability. So making sure that that's clear from the get-go and that it's a very dynamic and um open and honest place that you can have a conversation. Um, and again, you might even set aside time every three to six months at the most to really check in on how they're going and what their ambitions are and what their problems are and anything like that. The second thing is to have one single place for communication. So, um, and I've been guilty of this as well, and I find when um when I pull this back, it definitely makes things a lot more succinct and easy. Having one place for communication. So sometimes we get into this thing where we're connected on Facebook, we're connected on Instagram, maybe on Slack, we send emails to each other. If you've hired this person through Upwork or another third-party platform, you'll be connected there. And it just gets really confusing. So having um an understanding between the two of you of where most of the communication will happen. Sometimes there's a few things outside of that. But if you commit to saying, like, the main place that we're going to communicate is email, or the main place that we're going to communicate is in Slack or wherever it is, it doesn't matter, as long as you're both consistent with it, so that you're less likely to miss communications and miss anything that you've delegated to them. If there's something urgent, it's where they're going to see it rather than you know something that they only check once a week and so on and so forth. So having one place that you both agree is where you will do the mass the most amount of your communication is really important. Doesn't matter where it is, as long as it's consistent and everyone knows what it is. My third tip is similar to that one, it's having a single place for instructions or SOPs. So whether you've created SOPs before this person has entered your business or whether they are creating them for you as they're uh doing the tasks and creating the actions and that sort of thing, it doesn't matter. But it can be really confusing when you're looking for like, I know we've done this before. Is it a video that I've saved in Dropbox? Is it a video that's in Loom? Is it something we've jotted down the steps for in Google Drive? Is it something in Dropbox? Is it something that we've just put in Slack? Like looking around for the instructions takes so much time and brain energy that is completely unnecessary. So having again one simple space where all the SOPs are, whether it's Dropbox, Asana, whatever, doesn't matter as long as we all know where it is and it's easy to find where the instructions are. So that if I give you a task and I delegate something, if you're not sure how to do it, you can go straight to the place where all of the instructions always are and easily find it without having to go back and forth too many times. Cool. So that's the third one. The fourth one, and this is um a really, really important one, especially if there is a language barrier or anything that just could be, and you know, even if there's no language barrier, we all know how language gets um messed up sometimes in social media or in the communication of something and all of that sort of thing. So testing the understanding of the task is really important. So what I mean by that is if you are delegating a task to your VA, for example, um, ask them to repeat it back as they understand it. And it does, this does not have to be a teacher-student kind of situation. This is really just like, can you just just um just so that we're on the same page, just repeat back to me what you think the task is or something like that, um can be really, really helpful for them as well as for you because you don't want to be wasting money and time if they're not really quite sure what you actually meant or if there's some sort of disconnect there as well. The second thing is to ask them to complete the first steps and then check in. So this is this is a really um this one and this the next one, which is to ask, um, ask them to spend a certain amount of time, say for 30 minutes and then come and check in with you, is a really, really important thing. And it's actually really important for us when we're working for clients as well, to make sure that we're not going to be putting our heart, soul, blood, sweat, tears, and hours into something and it wasn't actually what they were after. If we checked in early on in that process with an early milestone where we either said, here's the 10 steps or here's the whole job, come back and let me know after you've spent an hour on it, and we'll just check in that we're going in the right direction, is an absolute game changer and there's no harm, no foul after half an hour or after the first couple of steps. So you can say, yep, totally, off you go, finish the thing, or that wasn't quite what I meant. Let's just course correct this before we've spent 10 hours doing the wrong job, right? Really, really important. You might not have to do that all the time, but certainly when you've got a new person working with your um with you, it's a really, really way uh great way to um safeguard time, hours, and money and you know, all of that sort of thing. So absolutely test the understanding of the task without just assuming that um that person knows exactly what you meant by that task. And the last thing is to have really regular and consistent face-to-face check-in. So it's one thing obviously to be sending um text messages back and forward or emails or delegating through a sana or anything like that, but there's a very different energy, um, and this you know comes back to the ethos that you want to create and the working environment, albeit remote, that you want to create with your team, but having that opportunity to actually get to know each other face to face, whether it's a 15-minute Zoom conversation once a week or um a FaceTime while you're going for your morning walk one day or something like that, really, really can make the difference to know what's going on in each other's lives, to know what's going on. We're all energetically very different day to day, week to week. How great is it when someone checks in and cares about that? Um, and you can definitely make things a lot more cohesive. Um, and you know, as I talked about in the other episode, is having um, you know, that that longevity so that we're not recruiting new people every five minutes. We actually get to hang out with the same person and retain them for as long as possible. So hopefully that's been helpful. I'll just really I'll just wrap that up because there's a lot in there, and as I said, I'll put this in the show notes, which will be at Claire Riley forward sorry, Claire Riley.co forward slash pod forward slash 81. So those steps again are having a really clear role description and uh being really clear on what the expectations are, having a single place for communication, having a single place for instructions and SOPs, testing the understanding of the task and having those milestones built in there as well to check the progress. And lastly, is having those regular face-to-face check-ins. So hopefully that's been helpful. Um, possibly you've had VAs in the past that haven't worked out for various reasons, and you may have just had a light bulb about what that might have been and how to avoid that in the future. So let me know if any of these things have stuck out. I always love to hear your feedback and your comments on the pods and blogs that I put out there. So please do let me know. Otherwise, I will see you on the very next episode. Bye.