As a home business owner, you may sometimes be responsible for everything from client acquisition to operations, customer support and accounting. Switching from one role to another can drain your productivity real quick.
A virtual assistant (VA) can make your job easier by taking away non-core tasks letting you focus purely on what you do best. More importantly, VAs do not cost a lot of money and it is often possible to hire one for as low as $4-$5 an hour. Such VAs are however located half-way across the globe in countries like Philippines or India. Successful outsourcing of tasks to virtual assistants is not possible without an effective training program.
Challenges with Training a VA
One of the biggest hurdles you may face while training a VA to do a particular task is the inability to get online face-to-face. Home business owners who are located in Europe or the Americas operate on a time zone that is diametrically opposite to the timezone their VAs are located in. This is challenging in the early days since your VA may have questions for you that you may not be in a position to answer right away. This may seem like bringing your productivity levels down further which is not something you want with a VA.
The other major challenge that VAs pose is the language barrier. A lot of cost-effective virtual assistants come from countries where English is not the primary language. Training your VAs to respond to customer support requests or send email pitches on your behalf may seem like a mistake. This is however partly true. Your strategy to hire a virtual assistant may backfire if you do not train them adequately.
A lot of these problems can go away if you hire a local VA who can communicate more effectively with your customers and also be present in your timezone. This is however a luxury for many home business owners since they charge a lot higher compared to overseas assistants.
Understanding the Job Role
At the outset, the role you have defined for your VA may seem pretty straight-forward – they would be required to answer support emails or fill inventory from an Excel sheet to your CMS. But doing this effectively is not possible without them understanding the underlying context. Teaching your VA why you do certain things is thus vital.
It is however worth noting that VA is a high-attrition job. As a bootstrapped business yourself, you may not have the luxury to invest time and money training your VAs only for them to quit. An effective way to do this is create training materials that can be reused again and again.
What Kind of Training Assets Work
The ideal way to train a remote worker is through a video conferencing channel like Skype or Google Hangout. The reason this is so effective is that it helps your VA with three things.
- Watch you do things that they can then replicate
- Ask questions and get them answered
- Ask for help anytime they are in trouble
Live video conferencing may not always work because of the challenges mentioned earlier in this article. You should however devise a strategy that addresses all these three aspects that makes live conferencing so valuable.
Video Tutorials
A lot of tasks that VAs help you with can be best demonstrated through the “watch and learn” method. Video tutorials are the best pedagogical tools to help you with this. You may make use of tools like Screencast-o-matic and Screencastify to record videos of you executing specific tasks that your VA could then watch to learn.
Some points to note here. The objective of this strategy is to create a ‘knowledge bank’ of video demonstrations that your VA could access any time they have trouble executing a task. It is thus important to create discrete video clips for each task. This creates “moment of need” resources that your VA could access to solve a particular problem or task. Large ‘webinar-like’ videos, on the other hand, make it difficult for the learner to access specific lessons and thus bring productivity down.
Another advantage with creating unique lessons for every task is that it makes it easy to outsource certain components of the job to a second VA, if that is necessary down the line.
Question Bank
No matter how good your video demonstrations are, your VA may still have questions that need answers to. A good way to fix this issue is by creating a question bank that contains answers to all questions that your VAs have asked you in the past. This is not an overnight solution and relies on your responses curated over a period of time.
Question banks are not entirely helpful if you have just hired your first VA. At this stage, you may still be required to answer each of your VA’s questions separately. It is however a good idea to route all these questions from your newly hired VA through a third party helpdesk tool. A number of modern helpdesk services have built-in ‘Knowlege base’ sections that can provide you with an effective platform to build a question bank.
Templates
The strategies outlined above are helpful in training your virtual assistant to do certain things. If you need your VAs to send email pitches to potential clients or build PowerPoint presentations for your business, then ‘how to’ demonstrations may not alone be adequate. In these instances, it may be necessary to provide them with the necessary templates to use.
You may, for instance, create a Dropbox folder with a bunch of various email outreach messages that your VA can access. This helps them execute the tasks required of them without having to spend time producing documents from scratch.
Monitor and Repeat
Training modules that work for one group of learners may not work for others. The first draft of learning assets that you create for your VA may thus not be the most effective. Given that most VAs are paid by the hour, it is a good idea to make use of tools like RescueTime to monitor the time your VAs spend on the various tasks. These tools can also be used to monitor the effectiveness of your training programs.
If your home business requires multiple VAs, you may also look at A/B testing various training assets to see what performs better. This way, you may build training assets that are most effective at training your VAs and getting your tasks done on time.
