Building Trust With a Virtual Assistant
Once you’ve made the decision to hire a virtual assistant, you have another huge decision to make: how willing are you to trust this person?
While a VA is contracted support (instead of a W-2 employee), what holds true in traditional manager-employee relationships holds true in a business owner-VA relationship. How well you trust and communicate with a virtual assistant will affect the results of whatever service they are offering you.
Easier said than done.
It’s easy to decide to do it yourself or to withhold sensitive information. It’s easy to keep your VA at an arm’s length (or three arms for that matter!).
But it’s hard to deal with those consequences. It sucks to have a to-do list that only you can take care of. It is counterintuitive to have a VA that can only take a task or project 60% of the way because you have the information for the remaining 40%.
So how do you avoid these energy-draining situations? How do you actually let go and trust your virtual assistant?
Start small.
I’m not going to sit here and suggest that you take an innocent until proven guilty approach with your VA if that is not how you naturally approach your professional relationships. Letting go to that extent in the beginning (while it can turn out successfully) will usually just give you a lot of stress and anxiety. Your inner self will encourage you to find something wrong and find a reason to not trust your VA…so let’s not even go there.
Start with small projects and tasks while you get to know your VA. Building this relationship will help you naturally lean into them for help later on.
2. Use systems to your advantage.
Allowing software to help you and your VA navigate through sensitive information will make it easier for you to collaborate without lending too long a leash in the beginning. If you’re sharing files, try attaching them to tasks on a task or project management board so that your VA has the information and data they need without having access to an entire folder of sensitive information. If you need your VA to get into your calendar, then try using a password manager like Lastpass so that your VA won’t see your actual login credentials.
3. Establish processes.
Trust can waver and falter when someone doesn’t get something in the way you expected it to get done. To eliminate that possibility, it tremendously helps to have your processes documented. This provides your VA with a resource to know exactly how you want a task or project completed.
This also gives your VA an opportunity to find ways to be more efficient. Win win!
4. Remember why you hired them in the first place.
A virtual assistant can be an incredible resource in your pocket because they allow you the time to focus on passion-oriented tasks, business strategy, and simply recharging. Remembering this can help you let go of tasks that are eating up your time even when it means sharing a bit of sensitive information.
Most of the time, our clients end up trusting our VA’s with a majority of the back end of their business. You’ll get tired of sending invoices yourself. You’ll crave someone to just respond to an email for you. You’ll enjoy having the extra time to spend on strategy (or just taking a nap).
You just need to start somewhere. Start with a little trust and a little effort to not micromanage and you’ll be on your way to having a champion assistant helping you.