When working with a virtual assistant, it's important to make sure they're actually working—especially before you pay them for hours logged to an assignment. After all, you don't want to be paying for hours that they're not putting in! We understand this challenge. So here are a few tips for ensuring your virtual property management assistant is doing their job so you can hire and pay VAs with confidence while improving your profits!
Define Responsibilities
Before a virtual assistant can deliver quality work (and hours), they need to understand their role and responsibilities. Take time to meet with your remote assistants soon after hiring to discuss the job and your expectations. Whether you've hired a VA on a project-by-project basis or your new assistant has a long-term role, it's critical to establish expectations and how you'll evaluate the hours they work.
Establish a Training Plan
If your new remote property management assistant is new to being a VA or to the tasks you assign them, make sure to put an effective training plan in place. Even seasoned virtual assistants need a training program that helps them understand your business, how you serve clients, and how they can do their jobs well.
Well-trained VAs are more likely to give you quality hours that help you feel confident they are truly working the hours they track toward projects and assignments. A good training and onboarding process also helps your contractors avoid confusion that could lead to redoing tasks (and paying double to complete a task that could have been done the first time correctly).
Meet Routinely
Have a weekly meeting to review key performance indicators (KPIs) for each virtual worker on your payroll. While some KPIs can be similar for all of your virtual assistants, it's critical to have individual expectations and methods of tracking performance for each VA.
Establishing this early on will help you determine if virtual workers are hitting their targets and progressing as planned. You'll also be able to quickly determine if your VA is working quality hours vs. putting "fluff" time toward projects without the progress or quality you need to see based on the hours worked.
Set Deadlines
If you've struggled with a remote assistant that seems to put in a lot of work (but takes too long to deliver what you need), it might be time to review how you set deadlines for projects or tasks.
Without clear deadlines, a 10-hour task that you need within the week could turn into a 20- or 30-hr job that you finally get in a few weeks (or longer). Clear deadlines help virtual assistants understand how quickly they need to work and when they need to deliver a completed project. Setting timeframe expectations also helps property management company owners monitor hours and quality of work from their virtual workforces.
When you find VAs that can meet deadlines without logging excessive hours—while delivering quality work—you can trust that you're only paying for the hours they actually work!
Keep In Touch
Tracking progress throughout a project's timeline or setting daily or weekly check-ins can help you monitor the hours a VA puts toward a task or project. This can also help your remote assistant track their time accurately and understand your expectations for completing the task.
When starting a project, establish your expectations for how many hours you think it should take your VA to complete it. Then, as you keep in touch throughout the week or duration of the task, check in with your assistant's time put toward the job so far. While it's important to let your remote team member work without too much interference, staying in consistent contact can help both of you manage expectations and build a good working relationship.
Give Feedback On Performance
From time to time, property managers might feel like a task took too long, or your virtual assistant logged too many hours into a project. If you're applying the recommendations we've already mentioned, your VA will improve the speed and accuracy in how they work to deliver the work you need more quickly (without sacrificing quality).
When you hire virtual assistants, ongoing training and feedback on performance can help these independent contractors become some of your most valuable team members! Plus, as they reduce the amount of time it takes to complete routine tasks on their plate, you'll see even better results on your bottom line.
Trust Virtual Assistants to Deliver Quality Work Through VPM Solutions!
VPM Solutions makes it easy to review the hours your virtual assistant works and pay only for the time they report accurately. With our dispute system, property management business owners don't have to risk paying for any hours their VA doesn't put toward quality work.
Begin your hiring process with our platform to find thousands of available remote workers that could match your job postings. Hire with confidence, then apply the strategies we've discussed today to help get the most out of your remote real estate assistants! Start your Free Company Profile today or reach out to learn more about how VPM Solutions works.
Set yourself up for success when hiring a virtual assistant! Download our free Real Estate Virtual Assistant Hiring Kit.
