Introduction
As a business owner or manager, you always have a lot on your plate. You have to wear multiple hats around the office to keep business running smoothly. With all those things at hand, delegating certain duties that don’t require your attention specifically can help you manage your limited time well.
For this reason, many business owners and managers hire full-time assistants to help them take these tedious administrative tasks off their plates. Business owners today are popularly hiring part-timers for roles like copywriting, marketing, data mining, data entry, and bookkeeping. But if you are a small business owner or someone with financial limitations, it doesn’t make sense to hire someone for this position on a regular salary.
According to a study, a virtual assistant can save you up to 78% on operating costs each year, compared to a full-time employee. Hence, hiring a part-timer or a virtual assistant can be an economical and efficient alternative.
While we have spoken about the many benefits of hiring a part-timer, it’s important to remember that it’s not going to be quite the same as hiring a full-time in-house employee. Although there is some overlap between the two, there are a couple of things that employers need to be aware of when outsourcing duties to contract workers.
In this blog post, we will share with you a couple of things that you need to keep in mind when hiring a part-timer to get the most out of your contract workers.
#1 Personality and Values
One of the first things you must keep in mind when hiring a part-timer as you would with a full-time employee is that their personality and values need to be aligned with the role they’ll be filling, the team they’ll be working with, as well as your company.
For example, one prospective hire might have the personality of an excellent personal assistant, but they might not be very open and sociable with anyone in the company. They might prefer to stay aloof and stick to their work. This can lead to miscommunications, low trust levels among the team, and increased suspicion of the new hire that could delay your work further.
Just like a full-time hire, a part-timer’s personality should be assessed before hiring them and should fit well with your company’s culture and the demands of working with your company in order for your association to be optimal and fruitful. Any part-timer or virtual assistant needs to be someone who you can easily get along with too.
Just because they are a remote worker doesn’t mean that you won’t be interacting with them. On the contrary, you’ll likely interact with them daily, if not multiple times a day. Having your company values and culture in mind before hiring a part-timer can make the hiring process easier for you.
#2 Onboarding and Training
Do you have a different training and onboarding process for part-time remote workers than what you have for full-time, in-house employees? While it’s useful and necessary to provide different kinds of training for different roles, it’s important to note that all employees, regardless of their roles, need the same tools and onboarding to be successful in their jobs.
Let’s say you hire one full-time and one part-time content writer at the same time. You onboarded the full-timer with all the necessary knowledge of the history of the company, its processes, rules, and equipped them with all the tools required for the role. But on the other hand, you didn’t onboard the part-timer properly, thinking that all they need to do is write on a topic given to them. This eventually will make the full-timer churn out more detailed, unique, and useful content as they possess all the skills and knowledge about your service or product while the part-timer will only be able to deliver basic content that may not be very close to how you want it to be.
If you want your part-time hire to effectively do the job you hired them to do, don’t allow the quality of your training to differ between the two, even if the content is somewhat varied. Training and onboarding should be thorough and should give them a clear understanding of things like company culture, values, goals, and structure as well as how to best perform their duties.
#3 Duties and Expectations
To ensure that your part-timer or contract worker gives their best to the job, it is essential to make your expectations and their duties explicitly clear right from the screening stage. A part-timer is not in contact with you or your company as much as your full-timers. This limits your part-timer’s access to how the company works, how things are expected to be done, and how the team functions on certain duties. Hence, if a part-timer does not have clear and open communication with you or your team about your expectations, they might not perform as you require them to.
Have a list of tasks and duties ready before you start to hire for the vacant position. You can do that by making a list of all the duties and responsibilities you expect your in-house teams to handle and those you wish to be dealt with by your virtual assistant or other outsourced resources. That will not only narrow down your criteria while looking for new talent, but it will also help you tell the part-timer clearly and precisely what it is that you expect from them.
This way you can ensure that your part-timer understands what they are meant to do and delivers on your expectations. If you don’t do that, there is scope for confusion and expectations not being met. You’ll find yourself disappointed by their performance and they’ll be dissatisfied with their work. That brings me to our next point.
#4 Clear and Effective Communication
Clear, effective communication is one of the best ways to make sure that duties and expectations are clearly understood by everyone, especially part-timers and virtual assistants. Since part-timers are often remote workers, usually communication becomes a barrier to the effective performance of duties. That’s why it is essential that you keep clear lines of communication between your team and your part-timers such that there is minimal scope for misunderstandings.
Once you have your list of tasks and duties, you can disseminate it to the appropriate parties. Remember to choose your words deliberately so there is minimal scope for confusion. While working remotely, it is best to overcommunicate so as to get your point across clearly and avoid confusion. Be concise with what you say and ensure that the mediums of communication between all parties are open and welcoming as much as possible.
Be conscious of how face-to-face or video interactions may need to be dealt with differently. Verbal communication allows you to use body language more whereas video calls may often require you to overcommunicate.
Explaining duties and responsibilities isn’t the only time you’ll need to communicate with part-timers or virtual assistants. You’ll need to communicate with them on a daily or weekly basis to check the status, give suggestions/feedback, clarify doubts, etc. Online communication tools like Zoom and Slack have become especially popular during the pandemic for this reason. They allowed businesses to easily stay in touch with their employees remotely. You may find these or other similar tools helpful in communicating effectively with offsite workers.
#5 Project Management and Performance Tools
Communication tools aren’t the only tools you may need when working with virtual assistants. You need tools for managing projects and performance as well. There are plenty of different tools out there that you can use to delegate tasks to your team members and track their progress. Tools like Trello, Asana, Toggl, Zoho Projects, etc. are popular choices today to help with task management and assignment, tracking billable and non-billable hours, and keeping track of work progress, among other things.
While each tool has its own features, perks, and cons, you should keep in mind that not all the best tools will be the best to solve your business challenge. Thus, you must carefully review your options by their features, cost, benefits, and more to find the one that is the best fit and most helpful for you and your business.
Conclusion
Hiring a part-timer or virtual assistant can be a great way to reduce your workload so you can direct your focus to other tasks and areas of your business as needed. If you choose to go this route, make sure you hire someone who is a good fit, give them the tools and training they need to succeed, clearly explain their duties and your expectations, be clear and effective in your communication with them, and use tools that will help you monitor progress and performance. This will help everything to go as smoothly as possible for all involved: you, your business, and your new hire.
Are you looking to outsource some of your business processes and functions? GoGenies can help you hire experienced part-timers or contract workers from any part of the world to enhance your sales, marketing, or any other teams at affordable rates. Just tell GoGenies your wish for your business and we’ll tell you how we can grant your wish! Click here to contact us today!
