Every leader, no matter the size of the organization, loves the idea of having an assistant. You cherish having the time to be able to focus on the essential facets of the business. Once you have a virtual assistant, though, it is time to delegate. You need to delegate tasks to him or her in ways they can feel valued and contribute while helping you at the same time.
Having a virtual assistant should be a mutually beneficial relationship for both parties. It is all about striking the balance of delegating the right tasks, at the right time, to keep everyone engaged and allowing everyone to gain from the arrangement. Which tasks make the most sense to delegate? What should you keep to do on your own? It is a fine line to walk; let us look at five things you can delegate to your virtual assistant to help make your life easier, and their work more satisfying.
Organization For the Win
Every single one of us could have better organizational skills. You may feel as though you are a very organized individual, but that could also be because you spend too much time organizing in the first place! Organizing is a fantastic task to delegate to a virtual assistant. Most virtual assistants have a positive trait when it comes to organization skills. They will also cherish the opportunity to clean up your mess, for lack of a better word, in the spirit of making your day more productive and seamless.
Organization tasks done by a virtual assistant is great for both sides. You get the benefit of more organization of your life and the virtual assistant can organize things the way he or she likes to see. If you are an assistant, it is likely you have organization skills you attain throughout the years. You also have a particular organization style. Trying to force an assistant to work around your lack of organization can be a challenge. Give them the reins, so they feel empowered to organize to help you both!
There are many different areas in which a virtual assistant can organize. Think about contacts you reach out frequently. Do you often forget how to spell their names? Do you know their phone numbers or e-mail addresses? How about which company a specific individual represents when they reach out? Organizing your contacts makes sense and can be powerful to provide that personal touch to clients.
Contacts are just scratching the surface when it comes to organization. What is the state of your e-mail inbox? Do you have an online storage platform you make use of for documentation? The chances are that your virtual assistant can implement a system so that everything has a proper place. Organizing is what assistants are excellent at and enjoy. Let them do their thing and make your life easier!
E-Mail Filtering to Clear the Fog
Do you ever feel like going through your inbox is like driving on an extremely foggy day? Think about that for a second. When you drive your car, and it is extremely foggy, you are trying hard to focus on the critical things. You are watching out for street signs, making sure the car is in the proper lane, checking for speed limits, etc. The effort you have to put in when you compare to a clear day to do these things is far more. The same can be said for when you are going through an inbox that has not been cleaned up or scrubbed for you, so let your virtual assistant take care of it!
Filtering of e-mails can help you get rid of the fog that exists in your inbox every day. You may have newsletters and things you want to read, but should that be the very first thing you check out at this moment? How many of the e-mails that make it into your inbox genuinely require your attention?
Give your virtual assistant the power to be within your e-mail inbox so they can filter it. Let them go through and eliminate the junk, park the newsletters you want to read later and prioritize the business and client-related e-mails you need to care for now.
When it comes to e-mail, it is all about clearing that fog and staying with a real sense of focus on the task at hand. You can get lost in the fog quickly and waste a lot of time if it is not top of mind. Delegate the work to your virtual assistant to keep that inbox clear and to place the e-mails you need to see first, right in your eye view.
Managing of Your Presence on Social Media
Social media has a massive impact on the business world, as well as our social lives. The delegation of maintenance of social media accounts is very valuable for virtual assistants to execute.
Think about how much time you spend on social media every day! MediaKix did a study that sought to see just how much time the average person spent on social media daily. What they found is that the average person spends 40 minutes on YouTube, 35 minutes on Facebook, 25 minutes on Snapchat, 15 minutes on Instagram, as well as one minute on Twitter. Throughout the lifetime of a person, the study found we will spend five years and four months on social media alone. This time is more than we will spend eating and drinking, socializing, even doing laundry.
The time in the study has a basis on more personal usage. You couple in what you have to spend to maintain your blog, Facebook group, or generally improve your standing on Instagram and the numbers go even higher! A business owner with a presence on their social media and business pages will spend excessive time and lose out on other value-add activities.
Give your virtual assistant the power to run your social media accounts. If there is a new blog that you write or someone in your company crafts, let the virtual assistant run with it and get it out to the masses. When they can post to your Facebook group, to reply to comments on Instagram and Twitter, they can help you and your business gain more visibility.
Having a second hand to manage social media accounts can help your online profile skyrocket. You may think you have a good grasp on what you do with social media, but you may just be scratching the surface. Even if you are doing an excellent job, there is no reason not to delegate so the time can be better spent elsewhere in your day-to-day activities.
Assistance in the Problem Solving Space
Virtual assistants excel in the research department. They can take a request for research, whether it is data or something else, and drill across the internet to help get you what you need.
You may be facing a problem which you do not know how to solve. You could spend your eight-hour day plugging away on Google, trying to find an answer, or you could have your virtual assistant do it in a much faster way. There indeed is an art to researching online and these individuals are the experts in the field.
Think about something like a new piece of software you want to use for a client. You may have a high-level idea of what the software does, but do you know how to get the most value out of it? Put the task on your virtual assistant and let them see where the rabbit hole goes.
The same goes for an area of your business which may be struggling. You may be trying to break into a niche and want to know what specific consumers are looking for, thinking about. Let he or she do some work on search engines, on social media, to reach out and see what they can discover.
The sky's the limit when it comes to problem-solving potential to delegate to your virtual assistant. When it comes to problem-solving, it is always best to get an opinion that is not your own. Even if you have a potential solution, bounce it off of them to see what they think. It may sound great in your head, but when an external party hears it, the idea may make very little sense. When you allow and delegate problem-solving authority to your virtual assistant, it can help create a much more solid partnership and a feeling of ownership of their role.
Proofreading for the Final Review
Ever given a presentation, only to realize that you have a typo on the slide while you are up on stage? It is one of the most frustrating things in the world, but it is something that we all endure at one point or another in our professional careers. Why does this happen? You reviewed the presentation five or six times. It happens because there was not a second set of eyes to look for potential errors, misspelling, grammatical misses.
A virtual assistant can be that final review for you, to do that last proofread. What happens to our eyes when we read the same document over and over is we train the eyes to think it is picture perfect. We start to believe we have no errors, even when a spelling mistake is staring at us right in the face!
Delegate the task of proofreading to your virtual assistant. The limit to this work does not have to be on just a presentation either. He or she may benefit you in proofing an e-mail, a letter you are sending out, nearly anything. It can always help to have someone look over a document one final time; you will get a surprise at what they found when your spell check told you there were no errors.
Let them develop a process for you where you write an e-mail, do something along the lines of placing it in a draft state, before they do a final proofread and send it off. Work in tandem, again building that partnership, so you both gain in the end.
Conclusion
Don’t you think it is time you free up more of your day? It would be better if you were not organizing, going through e-mails that provide no value to you. A virtual assistant can help with this, and allow them to go further in their career at the same time. Think about the delegation potential, and the time savings you get in exchange. It makes too much sense!
Every minute you waste doing a task which you could delegate to a virtual assistant is a minute you could have spent growing the business and improving your standing. At Uassist.ME finding the most qualified virtual assistant for your needs is their specialty. Don’t waste another minute of your valuable time, request a consultation today!