A recent blog The First Step to Successful Outsourcing posted to Virtual Elves stressed the importance and value of creating an action plan before taking the first step towards hiring a virtual assistant (VA). This week we’re expanding upon this and exploring the next step of your outsourcing journey:
Implementation
In order to form a productive working relationship with your contractor you need to have the right systems in place. This is especially true when it comes to working with an offshore VA.
Thankfully, comms technology has not only kept abreast of the rapid globalisation of the modern workforce – it’s wholly responsible for it! Telecommuting is an emerging term that describes this shift in business mindset – where employees are able to save the commute to the city office and work from their homebase. This modern work concept can also be applied to your outsourced VA. You can work efficiently and happily with your contractors, employees and clients, even if they are on the other side of the globe.
However, in order to do this successfully you must first implement certain systems to facilitate this. You must make cloud your friend.
Happily, there is a plethora of cloud based systems out there designed specifically for the modern business approach. Below is a short list I’ve compiled of systems that both myself AND my clients use.
If you are seriously considering outsourcing – you must seriously consider implementing some of these programs:
Project and Task Management: Basecamp, Asana, Trello
Accounting: Saasu, Xero, Shoeboxed
Email Marketing: Mailchimp, Aweber, Infusionsoft, Web Chameleon
CRM: Highrise, Zoho, Salesforce
Google for Business: Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar
File Sharing: Dropbox, Google Docs
Social Media Management: Hootsuite, Buffer
Content Curation: Feedly, Zite
Communications: Skype, Eventbrite, Go to Meeting
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