What Qualities to Look For in a Virtual Assistant?

Hiring the virtual assistants and training them to get the jobs done right is easier said than done. At the same time, it is undeniably cheaper to hire them to get the works done for your business.

It becomes quite a tricky task selecting the right people among the millions of home base business aspirants. Also, many among them are not serious about their jobs, and hiring such people is probably the fastest way to get into the bad books with your clients. Additionally, there are many applicants who are totally incompetent. Filtering the right people is definitely a challenge for businesses that are looking to outsource their business critical works to virtual assistants.

Professionalism: is probably the first attitude that you will need to look for in a person. You can get to know a lot about an individual’s professionalism just by looking at the way in which they respond to your emails. The things that you might want to look at would be the format in which they present their emails, and the promptness of their e-mail replies.

If a person has to work on your important business activities, he or she has to be very approachable and pleasant to interact with. This attitude in a virtual assistant is very important if you plan on long-term business goals with their participation. You cannot really work with people with mood swings, especially when you are unable to monitor them personally by their side.

The most important thing to look for in a remote worker is their willingness to learn new things. If not for this quality in individuals, training them can become are really tedious job. The best thing to do would be to check them with some small and jobs to start with, and then take it up from there. By doing this, you will be able to gauge the quality and timeliness of work they deliver.

Reporting Abilities:If you are thinking about outsourcing some of your responsibilities in order to make time for focusing on your core business tasks, you will primarily need to maintain your reports. Microsoft excel is a powerful tool with which you can maintain your reports in an ongoing basis. You will need to develop a tracking system to monitor the progress of your outsourced works.

Online Availability:The biggest drawback of hiring remote workers is their unavailability at times when you need them the most. They could be gone on a holiday, or they might be handing some emergency. You could be left high and dry when such situations occur. Therefore, you will need to make it a point that you interact with them effectively to understand the situations on their end as well.

If you want to know the Best Practices for Outsourcing work to Virtual Assistants, I would like to point one of my short books written solely from years of experience in outsourcing. It is a short book written for busy professionals with to-the-point information without trying to make it lengthy in order to sound more authentic. You can find more information on the following links.

Source: How to Outsource Work to Virtual Assistants or Freelancers ?

One of the most important factor that makes managers blind is that they operate within an organization. Despite the fact that the “center of business profits” or the factor influencing organizational growth lies outside the organization!  Do you know what it is? It’s your Customer.

The only business results  are produced by a customer who converts the costs and efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or services of the business.

The decision-maker is outside rather than inside the business, yet an average executive fails to see the picture that customer sees and he fails to understand the changing demands of markets. That is why companies find it difficult to maintain continous growth.

The reason for manger blindness lies in the fact that What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality. Even the largest organization is unreal compared to the reality of the environment in which it exists. What really happens inside any organization is just effort and cost.

The outside, the environment which is the true reality, is well beyond effective control from the inside.

It is the inside of the organization that is most visible to the executive. It is the inside that has immediacy for him. Its relations and contacts, its problems and challenges, its crosscurrents and gossip reach him and touch him at every point. Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused. The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.

The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified.

Thus it is possible that Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event).

Manager blinds is one of the key challenges faced by executives today. This article is one in the series to make executives aware of the hidden challenges in project management, and to make them able to overcome. If you are interested to read more on “Becoming Effective Manager” subscribe to this blog or bookmark it.

Note: This post is based on excerpts (and my readings) from Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive.”

Source: Managers are blind? Are you one of them?

Project Management is one of my favorite subjects and I have read many books on the topic. But the most important topic that has inspired me is being “Effective” in your work, especially management. It is effectiveness in action that creates a difference in project management.

The most important thing that I have learnt after much reading is that “Do not confuse brilliance with success or with the ability to execute”.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data.

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

Know the Knowledge Worker:

Another important thing that I have learned is to make best use of Knowledge Workers in your company or organization. In modern organizations the Knowledge Worker is the key player in making an organization successful.  Knowledge worker is the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands.

The knowledge workers are the new executives of your company. Their importance lies in the fact that they can make instant intelligent decisions and save “you” and “your time” from being used in everyday tasks and decisions.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.

The importance of the knowledge worker is perhaps best illustrated by a newspaper interview with a young American infantry captain in the Vietnam jungle.

Asked by the reporter, “How in this confused situation can you retain command?” the young captain said: “Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”

In a guerrilla war, every man is an “executive.”

Hence if you can cleverly leverage the knowledge workers in your team then you can surely push your projects towards completion. Putting ideas and strategies into action and to effectively coordinate with the knowledge workers are two tips that I wanted to share with you in this post.

Were you already aware of these facts? or I have contributed something to increase your knowledge and efficiency, share your views in comments.

Note: This post is based on excerpts (and my readings) from Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive.”

Source: How to become an Effective Manager?