While hiring a Virtual Employee (VE) is a major decision, training your virtual employee is the key to having success. It will completely change the shape of your business in better ways. Once you train them, you will have a seamless workforce.
Having a VE is not an overnight process; you need to deal with the changes one day at a time. Training a Virtual Employee can be a challenge for many reasons. The biggest is lack of free time. Which is why you need one in the first place – right? The second challenge is you don’t know where & how to start.
Before you hire, you need to set your virtual employee's duties and responsibilities as part of your team. On the first month you may want to have a daily chat with your VE to make sure you are on the same page and to establish a bond as well as to provide feedback of what is working well and what your VE needs to do to improve.
Guide your virtual employee with the tools you need to get the job done. Before you hire, you should make sure that they familiar with most of the standard ones realizing that you will need to provide training on those that are specific to your business. We recommend that you set a time of the week to do a training session for your VE via screen sharing or a recorded video of you working on the task with the same tool.
Here are some tips to effectively train your Virtual Employees.
1. Write detailed instructions
Send your VE detailed instructions of his or her roles & responsibilities and provide any instructions your VE will need to fulfill those roles. Also, send a list of the tools that your VE needs to get the job done. An effective email instruction is with the use of the following:
- Bullet points
- Include your goal and objective
- Provide screenshots
- Recorded Training links are also a great help
- Deadline of when the task needs to be completed.
Here’s an email sample you can use:
Hi VE,
I need your help with a new task of researching real estate agents in Peachtree Corners. We need their email address and phone number so we can set up a meeting with them for a possible partnership.
To get this done, you need to
- Study the attached file for the specific format required
- Search all the names of the agents in Google & cross reference them in the MLS
- Get their website address
- Find email address from “About Us” page or in the MLS
If you can accomplish this task this week, that would be great. Otherwise let me know if you have any questions.
Speak soon,
Client
2. Video recordings
This is one of the most effective ways of training. It’s a combination of audio and visual training which makes it much easier for your virtual employee to pick up the training.
When you give your VE a task, all you need to do is record your voice explaining what you are doing and why while you capture your screen doing the task. As you go through each step, explain to your VE why it’s done and the result of doing it. Upload your video recording in YouTube or Vimeo and provide your VE access whenever they need to in case they encounter a roadblock while doing that task.
We keep a video library of tasks so that training any of our staff is easy.
3. Voice recordings
While not as effective as the video training, this may be easier for you to do as it doesn’t require screen capture software.
Simply record your voice as if talking to your VE and share it to him or her via Google drive, Dropbox or some other sharing platform that you have set up.
- Make sure you have a clear and to the point instructions.
- Create recordings specific to a task and label them accordingly so your VE won’t be confused.
- Do not forget to save your recordings to a format like a .mp3 or .wav
4.Hire a company to train your VE
The most stress-free option is to find a company that will train your VE for you. These companies are experienced in training VEs for specific roles. You can be sure that their training materials are expertly done and tested.
At HireSmart Virtual Employees we provide a wide variety of training to help our clients. While we have a lot of industry-specific training, we also offer training on cultural differences, customer service, and sales support.
Even if a 3rd party is training your VE, don’t forget, you still have to assess his or her progress as well as train on the specific tasks to your business, but this shortens the learning curve in most instances.
5. Make use of online sharing tools
Google Drive, Dropbox are just some of the tools you can use to train your VE. You can upload previous files and let your VE study them Set a time at the end of the week or every 2 days and have a question and answer session with your VE.
You will be surprised how a VE can work independently. There are so many other options you can consider in training your VE. You just need to find what’s convenient for you and effective for your VE.
If you are interested in any of our training – feel free to look at our training products or contact us.