Majority of entrepreneurs started their businesses to achieve “independence” from the four corners of an office, create their own decisions, and follow their passion. One of the most sought after reasons for building your career is the promise of a life of work-life balance.
However, most business owners end up tied to endless obligations to keep the business up and running. Instead of freedom, business owners created more jobs for themselves.
As someone who knows the ins and outs of the business, you may find yourself struggling to let some of your responsibilities go. If you find yourself in this situation, you need a pair of hands and eyes, and some brains. You need to hire a virtual assistant.
Many businesses discover value in hiring a virtual assistant. This might be your key to unlocking more energy, time, and resources. Businesses reduce as much as 78% in operating costs when they hire a virtual assistant. On top of that, virtual assistants are more productive and productivity is one of the urgent matters your business needs.
Now it is out of the question that you need a virtual assistant and you will hire one. Hold on for a second, before you dive into the web of virtual assistants and remote staffing online, you have to do some organizing and planning.
A Standard Operating Procedure or SOP have the following purposes in your business:
- Guides in making big decisions
- Ensure outputs follow your brand’s quality and consistency
- Find you the right person, in this case, a virtual assistant for the job
- Promotes productivity, accuracy, and efficiency
- Encourage positive change
- Improves business management
- Prevent errors and missteps in daily operations
- Standardize procedures and systems
After establishing the importance of an SOP in your business system, the next step is creating one for your business and virtual assistant.
Creating your own SOP
So you have decided to hire a virtual assistant, prepared yourself for the process of delegating tasks, and organized the things to achieve the maximum benefits of getting support from a virtual assistant.
Now you have arrived on the part of creating the SOP for your business. As mentioned before, an SOP can help you improve your communication with your virtual assistants (or employees), increase efficiency and accuracy, and brings down confusion and lessen mistakes.
We have gathered information from the experts and list down the basic guide for formulating a Standard Operating Procedure that you can adjust and modify based on your business structure and goals.
Here we go!
- Set up your goals. As with any other system and strategies, your goals is the foundation of setting up the future of your business. What do you want to achieve in the future? What are your end goals? What do you want your SOP to achieve? Outline your answers to these questions and draw out details from those.
- Set your expectations. Now that you have set up your goals, the next thing you must do is set expectations. Owning a business is not a work in the park, the same goes with the other aspects of growing it. Identify potential challenges and issues in achieving those goals. Sharing these down on an SOP can help your virtual assistant prepare a possible solution in advance and capacitate your business whole to your work standards.
- Ask for inputs. Creating an SOP can be mentally exhausting as you have to consider all angles — your business, your employees, your customers, and everything else. You do not have to do this alone. If you already have a virtual assistant with you, asking them for inputs will not only build rapport but also encourage them to be more productive, engaging, and create accountability and ownership. Asking for inputs opens a new outlook on how you and others see things from different perspectives.
- Identify the scope of your SOP. What will you cover in your SOP? For whom is the SOP created? What is the main purpose of your SOP? Decide on the content and the limitations of your SOP.
- Choose a format, layout, and style. All the brainstorming ideas, research, and inputs for the SOP content will now have to materialize into a written document. Consider how you will best communicate your SOP to the intended reader.If it is your first time writing a SOP, think through the format, voice, tone, and it is going to be informal or formal. You can search the internet for templates and layouts for your SOP to be organized.
- Start writing your SOP. Your SOP could comprise of the following parts: a. Title Page; b. Table of Contents; c. Specific Procedures of the SOP
- Repeat the process of reviewing, testing, and editing. Involve your team in reviewing, testing, and revising the SOP. Make sure the SOP will achieve its goals for both your business and team.
- Update as necessary. As you implement your SOP, loopholes will come along the way. Update your SOP to address those loopholes.
You do not have to overthink your SOP, keep it simple and straightforward. The essential thing is to keep the purpose of your SOP and the reason you are creating one.
If writing an SOP is too much for you, VALUE Virtual Assistant can help you organize and establish systems for the growth of your business through our industry expert virtual assistants.
Give VALUE to your business. For more information and inquiries, contact info@value-va.com. For more contents like this, connect with us on our Linked In and Facebook Page.
