In today’s blog we’re going to go over what is a great way to communicate and collaborate with your virtual assistants even when you’re not there. 

One of the things that was really interesting for me to let go of some of the tasks that I don’t have to be in, aside from working out the focuses of the months and selling/promotions etc being outlined. Even just brainstorming those kinds of ideas with the team, once you get that kind of flow in the team, everyone really starts to understand what you want to attract, how you are going to do it; you can really look at the customer journey for example and what you want the customer wants to do next. If you’re using something like Linkedin which is a great platform to use in the business community, you can see how the engagement flows through. 

How to communicate with virtual assistants:

1. Sometimes you’ll have an idea late at night and you don’t want to disturb your team, so one of the things that I do is record video messages and share my screen to talk it through. 
2. If I’m on the go and I want to leave some feedback I’ll leave a voice recording because it comes across so much better than text. 
3. Sometimes text comes across as a bit combative or accusatory, but if you show your face and let the team hear your voice that changes things completely for the better. 
4. Communicating in this way will stop the team from overly apologising and feeling like they’ve messed up or done something wrong when they haven’t, its just that communication wasn’t completely there on the brief. 

One of the things that I am currently communicating to our team and to clients is the changes in Instagram and in order to make things as clear as possible for everyone, I use Asana for the business. 

Tips for how to have a clear Asana team board: 

1. Categorise the columns by day/week/month that the content will be worked on and what you want to achieve ie Pinterest post goals/ Mailchimp / instagram posts
2. Keep the discussions about content/strategy in the team dashboard 
3. For client boards, categorise what/when are you posting in each column 
4. I’ll preload the “idea topics” to team boards so that it is clear what our focuses are 
5. Record video updates for the team at the start of the week (Loom.com is a great option) you can also use Asana’s Vimeo integration as well. We’ll go over team updates, client updates, key focuses and go into granular detail
6. Add team members to relevant boards and tasks, utilise the comment section for team members to take a look. 

What if you’re so busy that you yourself cannot do the assignments for the week or the following week? We like to work on content 2 weeks in advance if not more. What you can do is to set aside an hour upfront to decide on topics and content for the next month in a video format if you can’t meet with your team so then its all gone through for the week and they can get on with delivering it. 

I would love to have conversation with you 1:1 about how you can work with your virtual team. Reach out to continue the conversation or book a call with the button below.