Controlling Your Virtual Assistants

Hiring a virtual assistant or an independent consultant or actually anyone who works remote for you have one thing in common. You don’t see them working for you. They might do your work, or they might not do your work. They might laze around on the beach, or have a great time in a bar. You don’t know what they are doing.

Micromanagement

However, there are simple solutions available for you to take the doubt away. You might choose to micromanage them, but the problem with that is that this costs too much of your time. You might choose someone who’s doing that for you, but that costs money and loads of unhappy virtual assistants.

Using software tools

For example, the tool Slack. Slack can give you and your VAs a direct line of contact easily. You can share ideas, files, messages – all within seconds!

With Fleep, you can communicate effectively with your team in one common space. With Fleep, you can communicate over projects, share files and reports, interact over audio, video and screen sharing and all of that in one place.

All of these tools help you and your team interact with each other as if you’re all in the office. A virtual office.

It becomes even better, you might consider leaving your office and staying at home using the tools. Arrange a room for you and promote it as your office, place a large computer, and you hire who you want (like virtual assistants). In this way, you can create a huge virtual office with hundreds of people without paying the - let’s say $900 per square meter.

If you want to look at other similar software tools, try Chanty. With Chanty, you can handle all of your VA communication in one place and much more. It offers chat, audio and video calls and screen sharing. On top of this, there is also a handy project management feature, so you can turn messages into tasks, making this the perfect blend of chat and project management in a single application.

Managing virtual assistants (and others)

Working with virtual assistants (and others) means that you assign tasks. That might be many small tasks, or that might be only one (dedicated) task (for example, “do the financial administration”). In principle, it doesn’t matter, all the work must be controlled by you. But in order for you to have an overview of the work of all your people, and even maybe yourself too, it’s a great idea to use a tool for that as well. And the funny thing is that such a tool can be free of charge as well.

Use a free project management tool like ClickUp to stay on top of it all.

You can allocate projects and tasks with detailed descriptions and files, set clear deadlines, number of hours allocated, task dependencies, check the status of your projects – in list or Kanban-style views, enable collaboration between your VAs and your team, employees and yourself.

Time tracker

When you work with virtual assistants or anyone else working remote, you need to be sure that those people, who are maybe a thousand miles away from you also work for you. The best way to do that is Time Tracking and Monitoring Tool like Time Doctor.

The problem with people, who get paid per hour, is inflating the time to earn more money. How do you know that you’re only paying for hours worked?

Using the Time Doctor, you can track how much time your virtual workers spend on tasks you assigned them.

All they have to do is click when they’re starting a task, and the app will start tracking how much time it took them. If they forget to do that, bad luck, because they will not get paid for the work they did.

Once they’re done with the task, they can switch the timer off, and you’ll have an accurate record of how long they worked.

If there’s been no mouse or keyboard activity for three minutes, the app will assume the VA is on a break and pause the timer.