Virtual Assistants: How to Delegate Responsibilities
How to delegate responsibilities to your VAs? As business owners, we all want the best for our businesses, but delegating responsibilities to our team of virtual assistants is one of the hardest things to do. This is our company and doing everything ourselves can feel like how we protect it from slipping through our fingers.
But to grow and scale, it’s important to understand that delegation is a vital factor. Delegating tasks to virtual assistants, which we often refer to as remote professionals, can enable us to finish more quickly. This frees up valuable time that you could be spending focusing on the big-picture elements of your business – ultimately helping push it to the next level.
In this blog post, I will outline how you can change your mindset to move your business forward and scale.
First: Change your mindset with virtual assistants
Delegating tasks to employees can be daunting due to the fear that mistakes may be made, but it’s important to remember this is a small price to pay for all the extra time you get from not doing everything yourself.
Mistakes aren’t the end of the world – instead, they can provide valuable lessons through retraining and coaching, plus a review of all necessary documentation.
The cost of potential mistakes pales in comparison to what you can achieve with the amount of time freed up from delegating: you can create an entirely new line of products or services, market your business more effectively and increase your customer base.
What and How to Delegate Responsibilities
Look at your daily tasks. Think of how much you would pay someone to do the tasks that you do. Likely you will have some tasks that you consider entry-level.
This can include things like administrative tasks, project management, calendar management, bookkeeping work, creating reports, social media management, responding to comments, administrative work, writing personal emails, etc.
Note the type of tasks or which tasks take a lot of time. Once you hire a virtual assistant start delegating these time-consuming tasks.
How to Delegate Responsibilities: Know which tasks drain your energy
If you’re considering what to delegate to a virtual assistant, it’s important to start by looking inward and identifying the tasks that regularly drain your energy or that you find particularly challenging.
These are likely the first tasks you should consider delegating, as they can quickly become time-consuming and that can often lead to feeling overwhelmed.
Once you have a list of these tasks, it’s then the time to start writing up playbooks and procedures – either with the help of a virtual assistant or before they start – so they know exactly how each task needs to be completed.
What new tasks should you be doing but you are not doing?
Think of the tasks that would really move your business forward. Some of these will be very high-dollar work that only you can do and some of it is just executing more client add-ons that a remote professional could take on, for example, more customer check-ins, or customer support.
Add the items that you have to do to your new job description as now that you won’t be doing the tasks you are delegating you will have time to move your business forward with tasks that are the best use of your time, and the other items are added to your virtual assistant’s job description.
What tasks would shore up your weaknesses?
It’s important to consider any tasks that can help you shore up any professional weaknesses that you may have, such as disorganization, email management and invoicing on time.
To make addressing these issues easier and more efficient, create specific tasks and add them to your virtual assistant’s job description. This ensures that your virtual assistant is able to take responsibility for these areas of your business and free up your own time.
Getting high-quality results with virtual assistants
Now you want to think about how you will manage success with these tasks. What does winning look like for all of these tasks?
How will you measure success with these tasks and can you make these tasks into a cadence for daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly so nothing gets forgotten and when your virtual assistant sits at their desk in the morning they know exactly what they need to do right away without effort from you?
Finding the right person
Think about the skillset, mindset, and experience someone needs to be really good at these tasks. Also, think of someone you would want to work closely with – what kind of qualities do they need to have?
You want this to be a person you enjoy working with because life is short you might as well love your job. Think about what questions you would need to ask in an interview to get a good culture fit.
If you take some time to go through this exercise and really think strategically about what you are looking for a virtual assistant to do, how you will measure success and what the expectations will be you have a much higher likelihood of the role working out and the role being successful.
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