Delegation is one of the most powerful tools a business owner has in the success arsenal. Knowing the right tasks to delegate to your virtual assistants or remote team can fully maximize their functions. You might just be surprised at how much time, energy, and money you can save when you start delegating tasks to virtual assistants.
Some business owners may find the word delegation and the act of delegating too enormous or even problematic to the extreme. The sense of trust, pride of being qualified to do something, and authority are somehow being shared with others when delegating tasks.
It is why business owners find it hard to assign responsibilities to their teams. The power to control is partly taken away and given to others. It may be the inability to let go or trust others, business owners have to cast aside issues.
What is delegation?
Delegation is often defined as “the shifting of authority and responsibility for particular functions, tasks, or decisions from one person to another.” In a “Situational Leadership” model of experts Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey, delegation is the last scenario in employee’s continuum experience and expertise.
Delegation is not the same as “commanding” or distributing things to do and expecting the subordinate to just obey. It involves a process of learning and engagement. According to Smartbrief, delegation is the leader or business owners’ decision to:
- Set direction and provide vision by leading.
- Empowering by trusting them.
- Openness to others’ skills and abilities.
- Grow and develop others through training and new experiences.
- Allow others who qualify as you to contribute outside work.
Importance of Delegation
In a business sense, delegating tasks is crucial so as a leader and owner, you can do more. But let us break it down one by one.
- Your business is like a machine. It is made up of several parts, and these parts function differently from each other. Bookkeeping is separate from marketing.
- Task delegation is a way to strengthen your bond with your team. Whether it is just you and your VA or you have 100 employees, delegating tasks is another way of saying “I trust you.” It will build confidence and gain insights from the tasks.
- You will learn to manage your team by delegating tasks. It will develop your patience, understanding, enhance training skills, and overall, become a better human.
- Allows you to strategize work and focus on income-generating activities.
- Tasks are done better with the qualified individual, trained, and possess the skills set for the job.
- Avoid burnout and stress levels.
- Allows you to spend time with your family, hobby, or basically to live your life.
What tasks to delegate to a VA?
For this guide, we will concentrate more on delegating tasks to virtual assistants or VAs. Virtual assistants have become popular these days due to the remote work setup, flexibility, specialized skill set, and affordability they offer.
There are several services virtual assistants offer to cater to the needs of businesses. These tasks are tedious, time-consuming, somehow repetitive, and routinely, crucial in your business operations but you do not need to actually perform them.
Some of these functions are the following:
- Customer Service
- Website Maintenance
- Travel Arrangements
- Data Entry
- Online Research
- Copywriting Content
- Scheduling Client Appointments
- Bookkeeping Management
- Blog Writing
- Email Campaigns and Management
- Product Listing
- Website Design
- Advanced SEO
- Social Media Management
- Ecommerce
- Recruitment and HR services
- Real Estate Sales
- Web Developer
- Business Reports
- General Administrative Tasks
As your business grows and increases customers every day, these tasks will become more frustrating. It will require more time to finish and before you know it, you will be trap in the cycle.
Effectively delegating tasks to a VA
Now that you have hired a virtual assistant, what is your next move? Before you begin to hand over a to-do list, keep this word in your mind — trust. As mentioned earlier, you are sharing an aspect of yourself and your business — skills, information of your business, time, and control.
So after you have established that trust must come first from you, read on our easy guide on delegating tasks to a VA.
- Create a list and include all the important details. Let the virtual assistant know which tasks are urgent and crucial, routine activities, and impromptu tasks. In this way, your VA can prioritize which tasks to complete first.
- Include step-by-step and clear instructions or systems on completing the tasks. While this sounds like spoon-feeding your VA, it will help your virtual assistant work efficiently and more quickly. This tip applies to repetitive functions and does not apply to all tasks.
- Share your company’s work guidelines. The quality of your VA’s work will be based on your guidelines and standards.
- Use cloud-based information sharing. Storing and uploading information this way is beneficial both to you and your VA. Updates are accessible in real-time. Also, you can easily track the progress of your VAs.
- Communicate with your virtual assistant. Regularly communicating with your VA can lead to many good things like monitoring the progress of the delegated tasks, connecting to your VA, building rapport, and imparting your vision of your business through constant communication.
- Trust your VA. This one of the most important aspects of working with a virtual assistant or a regular employee. Your virtual assistant undergoes rigorous screening before her resume winds up to you. Trust her experience and skills. Avoid micromanaging. Micromanaging destroys working relationships in any work setup — in office or remote work.
- Be open-minded. While you perfectly know the ins and outs and the systems in your business, your VA knows the technicality of their roles. Be open to suggestions. Two minds are better than one.
- Provide VAs honest feedback. Your VA will appreciate it if you could give feedback on how to improve their work.
- Set realistic expectations. There are two sides to this. Tell your expectations to your VA but also set realistic expectations for yourself.
Delegation of tasks might take time, and even harder for some business owners. You might find it challenging to surrender some of the tasks you are very much used to doing. But this is the risk you have to take for your business to grow.
The guidelines above will begin your journey with a virtual assistant. Sit back, breathe in, and have faith in your virtual assistant.
For your peace of mind, you can hire virtual assistants from reputable virtual assistant agencies who recognize the value of your hard work, sweat, blood, and tears you have invested in your business. With VALUE Virtual Assistants, your virtual assistants are guaranteed competent and trustworthy.
Is the future of your business still unclear? Talk to us! Outsourcing might be the answer!
