Craig Goodliffe, CEO & Founder of Cyberbacker.
A recent survey reveals that 35% of high-earning executives use a virtual assistant, or VA, and there are great reasons for that. Hiring VAs can allow companies to boost efficiency, scalability and productivity without incurring the costs associated with supporting an onsite worker. (Full disclosure: My company offers VA services, as do others.)
Achieving those benefits, however, requires more than just hiring a VA. As with any other employee, a virtual assistant needs to be successfully onboarded before they can contribute to an organization’s productivity. To do that, organizations should develop onboarding procedures that acknowledge and address the unique challenges associated with bringing VAs into the workflow.
The following are some steps that I have found valuable in bringing on VAs and integrating them into an organization’s workflow.
1. See onboarding as a learning process.
Establishing expectations is a critical part of any onboarding process. With VAs, it’s important to communicate from the start that they shouldn’t expect to know everything right away. Actually, I recommend establishing this expectation during the recruiting process. There are certain personalities that feel like they can’t move forward if they don’t have a lot of specific information. As a result, they often suffer from analysis paralysis. In my experience, that is not the type of person you want to hire as a VA.
The right virtual assistant will understand that learning how to operate within the organization will be an ongoing process. VA onboarding at my organization is a 100-day process. We start from the beginning with an agreement that there is nothing wrong with needing to hear something three or four times before you internalize it.
Begin your onboarding process by identifying priorities. Once those are set, decision-making typically becomes much easier for both the employee and the employer. With VAs, the priority should be to commit to a learning process that involves plenty of communication.
2. Make it easy to find the right information.
Technology will be an essential part of your VA onboarding process. But it can also cause problems by misdirecting your new hires. All of us have come to look to Google as the go-to when we need an answer. If your onboarding leaves VAs with unanswered questions, they will likely Google it, which may not lead them to the answer you want.
If there is a specific way you want things done, make it clear. Your onboarding platform should provide VAs with an easily accessible table of contents or FAQ section that outlines all of the information you are making available. Ideally, you’ll provide a library of explanatory videos that they can refer to when they have questions.
Expectations come into play in this area, as well. Make sure VAs know when they are expected to draw from your training and when they are expected to be resourceful and figure it out on their own.
3. Create opportunities for VAs to catch culture.
It’s often said that culture is more caught than taught. That simply means that being present in the day-to-day operations of an organization is a key part of understanding and adopting the culture. However, VAs aren’t able to experience the culture in the way onsite workers do, which makes it more challenging for them to catch it. If organizations do not find ways to assist virtual assistants in their cultural assimilation, they may struggle to enjoy the synergy created by common work styles and communication.
One way to provide VAs with effective doses of culture is to keep a constant video connection during the early phases of onboarding. By engaging in an all-day Zoom meeting, you create the effect of them sitting next to you in your office in the same way that an onsite assistant would. This allows you to share with them, hear from them and get to know them, just like you would during in-office training.
I believe that using technology to bring VAs into the office environment is a critical step in helping them understand how you work and how they can best help you. It allows them to see your operating style and workplace rhythms, which can help increase their comfort level. The less exposure they have to your workflow, the less comfortable and less productive they may be.
4. Avoid information overload.
Information overload is one of the top challenges to effective onboarding, in my experience. When new hires feel they need to absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time, onboarding can quickly become overwhelming.
One of the best ways I’ve found to prevent information overload is to provide a solid structure for your onboarding and stick to it. This starts with outlining the flow of the onboarding process. VAs should know what they will learn and when they are going to learn it, and this allows them to focus on the content at hand and not worry about the pace or volume.
Another way to prevent information overload is to take the time to assess if the VA comprehends what is being presented. In our training, we lay out the expectations for onboarding, then administer a quiz on the expectations to make sure new hires are crystal clear on what we have presented.
Virtual assistants can help provide organizations with the flexibility and efficiency that is important to success in today’s evolving business landscape. A key to realizing those advantages is developing effective ways to integrate VAs into your business’s workflow. Once those systems are established, your VAs can provide the same synergy as any onsite worker while also delivering a wide range of other benefits.
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