Archive for the ‘virtual assistant’ Category

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The idea of decentralized network of workplaces serves the needs of employees and companies in a lot of ways better than one large central headquarters. This impacts cost of maintaining one big department too. The cost could be cheaper if the work is outsourced to countries like Philippines or India. The possibility of teleworking has help companies provide employees work options and save gas. Supervision of remote workers could be a challenge. Although engineers and software developers are fast coming up with web conferencing tools, CRM, VOIP and control like online messaging and webcam, many supervisors still find it difficult to change inhouse employees to work in a remote environment. People are migrating to use the internet and emails everyday for their needs rather than the phone. Remote customer service agents are more affordable and convenient for your business provided you have set up your own program to run the operation smoothly.

What are your deliverables? This is a matter of getting things done by doing the right thing! And this is a matter of changing from unmasked efficiency to effectiveness mindset. Align and collaborate with your admin. Aren’t you familiar with scratched my back and I’ll scratch yours? Your relationship with your admin is critical. Leverage that relationship.

Delegate and push things to admin. Coach, gather feedback and be effective! You get the best possible administrative assistant money can buy and delegate. It would be better to get in trouble with your admin task and not for anything else. Pay a little bit more. Admin might teach you a few things too. There are executives who want the best quality at the lowest price. You want high reliable workmanship try paying higher rates too. Admin helps out of loyalty and this is a huge value in your organization.

Maybe you will know by now how important admin is for the executive. You can even ask her to do a little time stretching when you are on field and needs assistance online. Things change when you will be traveling and it would be a delight to bring an admin on board. Admin definitely keeps bosses updated and their work areas clean.

Me and my admin

October 1st, 2008 No Comments

Isn’t that good to hear? Looks like you and your admin have a very wonderful relationship. Want to be a very successful businessman then mind your relationship with your admin. Your business ally begins within the organization and not outside. Make your admin support you and you can go a long long way with your career goals. Stay on track and let your admin control your calendar. An effective admin always ask questions. The reason he ask questions is because he wants to know how to do his tasks correctly. It would be frustrating to do a task where your understanding is not complete. Your admin may be doing the best he can but is not effective because he does not know everything. Help him! He works for your success not his!

Do not let your admin guess or he will fail. And don’t expect too much when you haven’t done your coaching perfectly. Let your admin control your admin that simple. You need to delegate task properly and give him the proper authority to accomplish some things. Notice the changes when you do this. Feel less pressure and let him keep up the rhythm and the flow of your work. You never would want to be a one man band when you get those clients calling for your services and asking for their orders don’t you?

Reinvent admin

September 30th, 2008 No Comments

Build your political network through your admin. That is true. Know your competitors style and techniques by making close associations with their admin. Let your admin relationship work for you. Executives need to have a close working relationship with their admin. If you continue to keep your admin from getting involved in your business then you don’t stand much chance enjoying the fruits of your labor tomorrow in a clean bill of health. Don’t over drive yourself and don’t carry out a task that your admin can do and that you can do without. Create a guideline or a template for doing it right. Make more value with your admin and develop full potential. When you do cross over and obtain the full confidence of your admin then you can expect that the relationship will work more for the success of your business. Nobody would want to work for a boss who doesn’t care nor trust his admin right? Now ask yourself: where does your admin’s loyalty lie? You should know what it is that you are supposed to do in order to have a great relationship with your admin. Know how to be effective and ask yourself: what does this role requires of me?

Money… money… money… that’s how it has always been and that’s how it’s going to be in your future! This time prioritized your admin and you get more money with their help. Of course it is cheaper to outsource admin. Try the Philippines or India for a change. Capture what you believe and communicate your priorities. The executive or business man’s priorities and responsibilities determine everything. Let your admin filter the key issues you want to focus on and let them handle the less important emails. You need time to develop your network resources. Let your admin help you. Your charisma and your admin’s charisma are different and unique. You got your style and your admin got his style too. Tap it. Just tap it and go with the flow. This is rather good in building up your resources, allied, key friends and key relationships. If you haven’t let your admin manage your email or read your email then let him handle it now and focus on key issues and main task. Deliver what you need to deliver and tap what your admin got. Let it become like a partnership by bridging the gap. Communicate, teach and make yourself effective by making your admin efficient!


An effective executive or entrepreneur spends time to teach admin. That is rule number one. You don’t hire an admin and then let her wait when you are going to have time to train her. You are wasting considerable organization resources doing that. Clearly your admin functions by how you drive them. How you measure time and priority and manage your admin schedule is a matter of your ability to make a large impact in the organization. Never assume anything when training your admin. Ask and train. If you’ve never been a teacher before then just be a good friend and converse. That is one technique - conversations!

In every successful businessman is a great admin, remember that. Make your admin believe in you and your mission. Let her help you achieve your goals. Don’t get her separated from your effort because she is for a fact your support! How could you ever take a support apart from your business goals? If you mean to practice this and do not know how to start then begin with a casual conversation but don’t praise and nag. My God if you want to praise then praise but don’t follow it up with a nag or you will sound plastic!

Focus on effectiveness and efficiency by taking things out and make more time becoming efficient. Let your admin do the paper works while you do the administrative task of marketing and planning. Let your admin manage your schedule while you prepare what to say to your meeting next. If you feel there is too much to do and that there is always work to be done and can’t leave out time to coach your admin then maybe it is high time you get to decide if you want to be effective or not. When you wake up and when you go to bed on same load of paper works on your desk then it is high time you stop and think over what is the role of your admin for you.

Executives need to let admin do their thing their way to be effective. There is a big difference in really following out your way because each of us in matter of time discovers how to efficiently do our task to be effective. They are an extension of you doing your workload but not an extension of you as a person. They are grounded by corporate rules but not personal law.

This is not a “your wish is my command thing”! It is best to meet at least 5 minutes a day for questions and approvals, like a daily catch up. Too much time spent on coaching and getting notices is already a bore and does not sound pleasant to the ears anymore. Never overdo coaching. See the progress, give tips but never overact training. Coaching is a matter of seeing through implementation. That is the main concept of coaching!

There is no guidebook on following personality rules but there is an SOP on corporate guidelines. What keeps executives to better relationships with their admin is direct instruction and implementation of personality and what they want rather than seeing progress. Stop putting yourself as a model and begin to see your admin eye to eye and how she complete things.

Observe what she sees best and effective for her and forget your wishes for a moment. We are talking about being an effective executive and that includes giving your admin the freedom to perform her duties and tasks in a way she finds comfortable, convenient, easier and motivational. Making her a copycat restricts her from innovating work system and this could affect your effectiveness as an executive!

Email management is a completely delegatable task which majority of the executives feel is their work. Ignoring valuable admin resources makes your system less valuable. Executives doing the tasks of an admin are clear waste of time. Delegate what can be delegated then meet 15 minutes each day of your work week to discuss on important matters. You may focus on the context of the mails under the criteria of what is coming in and not who it’s coming from. You need to filter out important corporate mails from spam and personal mails. Admin can certainly do this for you. Unable to delegate the simplest email handling task erodes trust and may affect work relationship and your effectiveness. CEOs must know how valuable admin are. They must learn how to prioritize email while they are looking at your mailbox and not before that. I repeat give training while they are sitting at their chairs, at their desk, opening your mails and not standing at your table looking at your desktop. There is a big difference to that. Orientation should come with full hands on training to determine content samples.

There is one thing I can say to this: If you can’t delegate then there is no reason having an admin.

People don’t feel comfortable exposing their selves to their admin. Their work, their emails and communications and personal notes shall be seen and read by their admin. There is no point hiring an admin when one does not feel safe and sees admin as risks to profession, business or career. Admin is a resource given by the organization to make you more effective in your task. I guess you need to separate personal emails from corporate emails this time.

Create another ID for your personal email. Gmail is best but Yahoo is also free. There are other email providers you may purchase an email account too or purchase one at Godaddy and then use the domain for your free online photo filer or photo storage while you make use of the free email that comes with the package for the price of $7 to $10 a year depending on your promo code. This is cheap considering your privacy right?

There is nothing wrong in driving yourself to be a better executive or business entrepreneur. Try to ignore the combination of things you usually do and leave it to your admin or virtual assistants to manage. There is no management guidebook when handling delegation. It is all up to you but you should not be spending 90% of your time reading on mails. Let your virtual assistant filter it for you!

Getting caught up in the traffic of your present tasks and your upcoming work load? Just give it up. Know that outsourcing has been going around in the net for sometime and there are several tools that you can use to be effective with them. There is no use doing it all for you on your own. Find what your money can buy and leverage the service that you can find online.

Outsourcing has been helping a lot of business entrepreneurs complete their task 24/7. Why is this so? Because of your different time zones, when you are done and is ready to go to sleep, she wakes up and continue to work for you. The question is: How much of what you can do can be done by your virtual admin assistant?

This is rather a quick decision making process of how much, how long and what extension of yourselves are you able to share with your admin. If you have given it a thought then call me because I am a Virtual Assistant who loves to help you when you get to define your goals lol.

Relationship management within the corporate structure focuses on two things for the executive: your admin or virtual assistant and your important people list. You are to maintain the right relationship for the right people. And this could happen only if you were specifically clear on your admin’s role for you. Do you want to continue managing your calendar and emails instead of your marketing strategy? This is a kind of a crossover role, a kind of a turnover of that little extension of you. Relationship management is about relating to others and you don’t need to handle your calendars and your emails personally.

The trick is to let your admin know the importance of each of your contacts. Let your admin know how to handle your calendar. And let your admin know what the organization’s priorities are. You belong to the corporate world, your time within the company clock is one of admin’s key deliverables to effectiveness. Anything admin can do to improve efficiency is effective. In short, trust your admin can do more if you are confident in delegating tasks. Just ask yourself how much of what you can do can be done by admin or your virtual assistant.

Then transfer duties to admin and make it your responsibility to find a way or establish a system to monitor on things so your admin could be more effective. I had a client before who is only giving this much information for a work assignment that needs that much information. If you do things that way, your admin would never be effective. You and your admin will have a failing relationship. Working with insufficient information and tools could never make your admin effective.

I think this could not be helped. Some managers and entrepreneurs still do not know how to effectively tap their admin or virtual assistant’s skills. Trust could be one factor but confidence on your virtual assistant’s capability to do what you have in mind is another thing. Delegation then is a matter of giving it a go or continue doing the things you want to do which does not justify your 6 figure pay. Well one thing for sure, you would never choose them if you think they are not capable completing what you plan to be their duties or functions. Maybe one needs to stop for awhile and think if they are already clear on the direction of their admin or virtual assistants. Directions are important. Limitation on the accounts of responsibility are reflected from there. Relationships with Admin and virtual assistants can only be improved if the manager or the entrepreneur itself knows his direction.