UassistME Blog | BPO Insights & Useful Resources

Want to Increase Your Productivity? Allow Yourself to Embrace Delegation

Written by Uassist.ME Team | Apr 9, 2019 9:28:59 PM

Whether you run one small office or ten expansive facilities, you probably constantly have productivity on your mind. You never have enough time to manage things in the most efficient ways, or so you think. You may simply need to understand and enjoy the following benefits of delegation.

Delegation Helps You Focus Your Time

A constantly ringing phone is a deterrent to productivity. If you're a manager or business owner who must answer every call, ask yourself why. Several reasons for your phone diligence may exist, but none of the reasons overrides the productivity losses you might suffer.

Some of the reasons you might micromanage daily business activities (including phone conversations) may include the following:

  • Your employees are poorly trained.
  • You might not trust your employees.
  • You're in a remote location with no access to staff.
  • You've lost your administrative assistant and haven't chosen a replacement.
  • Your business is small and has no funds for full-time administrative staff.

If you don't trust your employees or feel they're not ready to handle phone contact with your clients, the best options are either to train your staff or let them go. Trained and trusted staff can take over many responsibilities so you have the freedom and daily efficiency to develop your business and reach your goals. This freedom makes you more flexible so you can address the key concerns of the day as rapidly as possible.

Temporary and virtual administrative assistants are effective solutions to missing support staff. Don't get lost in the chaos of a remote location or a growing business, but let a temporary virtual assistant screen your calls and handle mundane tasks until you can fill key positions. Meanwhile, you get to focus on the strategies and relationships that mean the most to your company.

Delegation Shuts Out Wasteful Activities

When you assign tasks to onsite or virtual staff, you reduce the wasteful activities that steal time from everyone's day. If one of your engineers or sales staff must take time away from their desk to hunt you down, or you have to spend 15 minutes searching your inbox for an important vendor e-mail, you don't use your time or your staff's skills to their full potential.

If you feel you must personally take every single company phone call or respond to every business-related social media post, start adding up the time you spend on small talk, waiting on hold, or composing professional correspondence. Which business-changing activities could you pursue if you didn't spend big chunks of your day on these activities?

Hire a virtual or real-life assistant to manage time-wasting tasks for you. A trained assistant gives you back the time you use on chit-chat or on hold waiting for a vendor to give you a quote.

Virtual and real-life assistants can handle the following tasks:

  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Scheduling
  • Social media
  • Public relations
  • Finance
  • Programming

Assistants are valuable time-savers when you must travel frequently for business. Your assistant can book flights, hotel rooms, and other accommodations for you, which saves you time and aggravation. Assistants can keep track of travel arrangements for all staff and act as a go-between so that traveling staff don't constantly contact you for support.

Be specific when hiring or contracting temporary and virtual assistants. Seek and hire staff with the skill sets you need to give yourself breathing room and cut wasteful tasks from your day.

Delegation Improves Checks and Balances

Any business can be overwhelmed by its workload, whether that business is a small start-up or a rapidly expanding corporation. When a company community is overwhelmed by the details of its day-to-day operation, staff may neglect implementation of important business safeguards.

An overwhelmed staff may put a company at risk in the following ways:

  • Shoddy client or code-compliant record keeping
  • Failure to schedule official tests and inspections
  • Late payment of important accounts
  • Late, incorrect, or no billing of clients
  • Improper expense-account use
  • Damaging public statements about business
  • Failure to obtain permits and licenses
  • Lack of employee documentation
  • Lapse of insurance plans
  • Unpaid income and other taxes

Any of the above issues could cost your firm a significant amount in fees, penalties, and legal action. Your business reputation could suffer severely if someone received an injury due to negligence on the part of your business.

If you operate in Central or South American markets, you may need to provide legal forms to the local and national governments of those nations. Hire a bilingual English-Spanish speaking assistant to keep up with the deadlines, translate the forms for you, and help you prepare the documents. Bilingual assistants provide you with trustworthy information to stay on top of your duties in foreign markets.

A real-life or virtual assistant has the skills and expertise to keep track of their area of focus, whether that's taxes, human resources, or sales. A trained assistant meets important deadlines for your company and keeps you informed about upcoming responsibilities.

Assistants can also advise you when an employee misstate their working hours or when a client's bid deadline approaches. A whirlwind of competing concerns becomes an organized system of checks and balances when you hire the right assistants.

Increase your efficiency and lower your stress level by contacting Uassist.ME today. Our virtual assistants are bilingual in Spanish and English to expand your communication and market potential.