Not many online business owners know how to onboard virtual assistants in such a way as to maximize their productivity and let them get the hang of the job quickly.

And most virtual assistants will never say a word to their employers about how they can be better integrated into their jobs and team.

Maybe it’s the fear of not stirring the waters too early in their new jobs.

Or maybe they don’t want to give clients the idea that they don’t fully understand what the job entails.

Well, I’ve taken it upon myself to speak up for the thousands of virtual assistants all over the world on how we want to be onboarded.

This post will lay out important onboarding techniques that’ll not only get your virtual assistant absorbed into the job quickly but will also help them carry out outsourced tasks according to your preferred style and methods.

The expectation and communication gap between you and your virtual assistant (VA) will be closed when you correct these onboarding mistakes.

When business owners skillfully bring in virtual assistants into their businesses, they can fully enjoy the speed and productivity a VA can provide.

5 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Onboarding Virtual Assistants

I’ll highlight the common mistakes made by employers that virtual assistants wish to voice out when they’re being onboarded.

Ready?

Let’s go.

1.  Not creating training videos for newly onboarded virtual assistants

One of the first mistakes that virtual assistants notice during the onboarding process is the lack of video tutorials in the job description.

Sure, most employers create a written training manual called a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) that contains steps on how a VA can carry out a specific duty.

However, virtual assistants wish to communicate that humans learn primarily through visuals.

A screen recording of an employer performing a task will do more for a virtual assistant than the most detailed SOP created.

Not only will your VA see exactly what you do, but they’ll also get a live demo of how you do it – something a written training manual can’t provide.

This will greatly reduce questions and back-and-forth emails between the two of you because if a picture speaks a thousand words, imagine the volume of words that a video communicates.

The technique to avoid this mistake is to make use of a free online tool to screen-record yourself carrying out those tasks you want to assign to your VA.

Then send the link to those screen-recorded videos to your VA.

Let’s say you have an email marketing virtual assistant and you want him to prune your email list as part of the job description.

Telling him to go into your email marketing software and remove inactive email subscribers might see him manually remove unengaged subscribers one by one, wasting a lot of time in the process.

If you explain how to do it in a written SOP, he might get confused along the way and come back to questions, increasing the back-and-forth communication unnecessarily.

Instead, showing your email marketing VA a screen recording of how you’ve pruned some set of subscribers will give him pinpoint precision and direction.

All your virtual assistant has to do would be to follow your steps and refer back to the videos whenever he gets stuck.

2.  A vague or undefined idea of tasks to be outsourced

Sometimes, entrepreneurs whose online businesses have grown so much get clogged up with day-to-day activities that almost render them unproductive as they go solo.

It could be that you now spend hours responding to emails from customers till you’re drained to do anything else.

And you now struggle with creating content for your website and managing your social media presence.

All of that is good, as it means that you’ve grown your business to the point where you need to scale and stop being a one-man show.

Now, you need low-cost assistance to help you with staying afloat in your business.

Don’t fall for the temptation of hiring and telling a virtual assistant to just help you with running your business, to help you with anything and everything.

No, you need to outline a specific list of activities for your virtual assistant to handle, so that they’re measurable and achievable.

Your VA doesn’t want to keep working for you with no way to track progress, because there are no clear and definite tasks to help out with.

Here’s what you should do before bringing in a virtual assistant.

As you go about your daily business, any activity that you feel you no longer want to do because you don’t like it or your time is better spent doing something else, write it down somewhere.

In a week, you can then review all the activities that you’ve written down, group everything into a job description for a virtual assistant, and then hire.

3.  Not offering honest feedback early enough

For the first few days after onboarding your virtual assistant, your VA works to get in sync with your workflow and expectations.

You both keep adjusting till you’re in complete blend and harmony by reviewing the work done and offering corrections, and in return, your VA adjusts and improves until he delivers results in the style and manner you desire.

Many online entrepreneurs never bother to offer sincere suggestions on the completed tasks carried out by their VA.

Doing that will ensure that your virtual assistant will quickly improve till he ticks all the right boxes of the completed picture of the task you had in mind when you delegated it.

In addition to offering feedback, also ask your virtual assistant about any challenges encountered while performing his duties.

Have your VA share any difficulties experienced and hear his solutions on how to deal with the problems.

Doing this regularly, especially during the early days of getting onboarded, will straighten out issues and strengthen business productivity.

4.  Trying to micromanage your virtual assistant

Even as you monitor the progress of your virtual assistant after the onboarding process, try not to choke them with unnecessary supervision.

Give your VA free room to use his initiative and make decisions on the spot as long as the job gets done to your satisfaction.

One easy way to do this is to avoid focusing on the processes your VA uses in getting tasks done, and instead focus on the outcome.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of micromanaging when you insist that things must be done in a particular way only.

And also when you unnecessarily monitor the steps your VA uses in performing his duties.

A better way is to paint a clear picture of what the completed project will be like to your virtual assistant, have your VA follow your screen-recorded training, and allow your VA space to make some optimizations on the fly if needed.

Is the finished task the way I want it?

Am I completely satisfied with what my VA has done?

If the answer is yes, then you’re good to go.

This way, you’ve eliminated the need and urge to micromanage your virtual assistant.

5.  Inability to let go of control

Giving up control of an aspect of your business to your VA is one of the things most business owners struggle with.

After all, you’ve grown this business by your own steam all these years. It’s a little bit too precious to let a stranger have access to it.

Well, if you’re going to scale the growth of your online business, then you’re going to have to trust your VA with holding the fort down for you.

Having trained your virtual assistant, step back and let him manage that area of your business while you focus on those high-impact activities that only you can do to grow your business.

Releasing control is an important step in onboarding a virtual assistant.

You’ll have more free time on your hands to carry out those revenue-generating activities or you can choose to spend it with your family.

Final Thoughts

These are the most common mistakes business owners make during the onboarding process of virtual assistants.

With what you know now, you don’t have to make them.

You can now enjoy the full perks of using a virtual assistant to create more time, supercharge productivity, and ultimately increase the income of your business.

Author Bio

Bryan Grey is a virtual assistant who helps online entrepreneurs execute tasks they’d rather outsource and manage their businesses.