How to Effectively Delegate Tasks to Your Virtual Assistants

How you ever wondered how equestrians ride their horses during races? The rider cannot impose much, and the horse cannot resist much as well, lest they both stumble and fall to the ground. One author says, “The real expert riders in horses let the horse know immediately who is in control by guiding the horse with loose reins and seldom use the spurs.”

Just like in delegating tasks, one person cannot trust all the jobs to others. The one who delegates should also work too. As a boss, your team members are rooting for you. They need to know that you are in control. It is not because they do all the work, but because you delegate the tasks. In doing so, you are also becoming productive with more important things for your business.

The boss cannot do everything as well just to gain control over your business. You need to delegate the tasks that you hate, the tasks others can do, and the tasks others can do better. Having trustworthy virtual assistants will help you carry all the burdens. It even allows you to focus on more urgent tasks for the business.

So you may ask, “Why do I also need to delegate tasks to myself?”

“Why can’t I just give all the tasks to my team members while I enjoy all the credit?”

“Where do I start?” “How do I delegate the tasks?” “What tasks should I delegate?”

Now, breathe and sit tight. I’m going to share with you a powerful tool that you can use to delegate tasks to your virtual assistants. However, before set forth these tips, let’s first take through the benefits of delegation. 

Delegating does not mark you as weak or incompetent. It even reminds you how great a leader you are. Besides that, the value of delegation also reflects your capacity to trust people around you. For this reason, you will significantly gain positive results, including the things below. 

Delegation elicits better efficiency. Allowing others to perform various tasks will bring fast-moving and valuable results to the company. It also helps the organisation to become more coordinated, effective, and productive. Once these jobs are divided into some individuals, they can quickly finish it even earlier than the deadline, boosting their productivity.

Delegation emerges a stronger relationship. Business owners who also assign activities to subordinates or even partners also bring healthier communication and teamwork. It also enables the workforce to share ideas and skills, ensuring a better working environment. 

Delegation increases development. Entrepreneurs will also benefit from delegation as it improves the company’s workforce progress. So, it even results in a better status of the organisation, particularly in operations and management. Additionally, employees who receive extra tasks also develop new skills whilst learning from their seniors.

Delegation reduces stress and anxiety. Both you, as the business owner and your employees, will also lessen workload anxiety and stress. Dividing the task will help to lift tons of functions in one person. So, it provides healthier working life and conditions instead of pushing oneself unnecessarily.

Entrepreneurs have options of how they may delegate tasks. They also choose who and where to assign tasks, ensuring that it would maintain its value and efficiency. Here are two options you may consider.

Assigning tasks to your current employees. If you have employees who can give you some assistance, you may post more functions to them. You also consider hiring interns to train and teach whilst they handle smaller assignments from you. Other than that, people within your organisation who have extra time can also receive other job responsibilities if possible.

Reaching out an extra hand from partners and professionals.  Entrepreneurs can also find some partners who specialise in outsourcing tasks and assignments. Some of these companies handle virtual assistants who can lend extra help in performing different things for your company. One benefit of reaching out to them is that they are skilled and experienced in assisting businesses owners like you.

You may proceed with any of this, especially the latter, as it gives you the freedom to delegate the task to a specific individual. To guide you throughout the delegation process, follow the following suggestions below. 

Whether you hire a virtual assistant or ask someone from your employees, you still need to prepare several things. Arranging these matters together will help you have a smooth handing over tasks. It will also guide both of you to do the transferring of activities successfully. 

Produce a task schedule. Before sending all the assignments, you must first finalise the plan you want them to work for you. You may decide which time you most prefer, and know how many hours they will give to you. Generating the plans for their schedule would be the starting point to prepare them for the things suitable for both your convenience. 

Remember, you are asking for their help, so both of your schedules must come along together. So, kindly decide on this part and reach to them if they approve this schedule.

Help them feel welcome. If you hired a virtual assistant, it is essential for your other employees to them him or her. It would be helpful for the whole organisation about the people they are working with. Also, your virtual assistant may communicate with them if they need help instead of bothering you on most hectic days. 

If you just delegate the task to your employees, you may also announce them during the meetings. Everyone needs to know each other’s jobs to avoid miscommunication. 

Create a plan for sharing work files and documents. After checking out your schedule and availability and your assistant, you need to prepare the files and documents they are about to work on. You may also include the details about the accounts on online tools and social media. If you prepare these things successfully, you will easily entrust them to them without any hassles. 

Many entrepreneurs use organising tools like Trello, Asana, Calendly, and others to organise the information and schedule. You may also use this to plot out the materials they need once they took over some of your tasks. 

Make tutorials if possible. Another thing essential before the assigning of tasks is preparing simple tutorials for your virtual assistants. It could be a short video or a list of jobs they are about to do. You may show them how to do a particular task and give them some tips on doing it correctly.

If you help your virtual assistant or anyone tamiliarise your task, it will make their job faster and more comfortable. As a result, a more efficient individual can handle some of your roles. 

After you complete these things, you can start identifying the tasks you want to consign to others. Of course, you are not giving them everything, and you are not assigning them nothing. So, to help you see the validate the tasks, here are some ideas you may delegate to them.

If you still cannot decide what to pass on to your virtual assistant, check out these examples.

Time management tasks. It caters to managing work diary, personal to-do list, personal and business schedules, meetings, and appointments. 

Virtual administrative tasks. It handles computer works such as entering data, encoding, secretarial duties, managing email and documents, answering phone calls, and dealing with suppliers.

Business finance support. It maneuvers invoicing to clients, filing tax returns, bookkeeping, expense management, and credit control. 

Marketing Support. It supports email marketing, social media management, website management, marketing research, benchmarking, CRM management, and SEO content management.

Sales Support. It carries tasks for business appointment setting, telemarketing, lead qualification, lead generation, and sales pipeline management.

Travel and event planning. It involves event planning, event research, booking of venues, travel tickets, hotels, and business travel planning. 

You may include two or three among these categories. However, you may also assign these to them depending on the things you highly need help with. Just be reminded that essential tasks should always land on your hands. So, you may send the minor activities to your assistant and let them accomplish them without your full supervision.

After you finalise the schedule, list of job orders, and things for your delegation, prepare yourself on handling them to your employee. 

Follow these suggestions below and see for yourself how beneficial it is to delegate activities to trusted individuals.

Have precise tasks and goals. State your objectives to your assistant clearly. You must explain the scope of their duties and allow them to understand your business goals why you are asking for their assistance. Aside from that, you must also precisely present your short and long term goals within your team for them to be motivated as well. 

Have clear work standards to follow. You may also introduce your organisation’s values and mission to your new assistant. Through this, they will know your guidelines and expectations as part of the team. It will also help them cope up efficiently working with you and your employees.

Find someone you trust. A virtual assistant or employee you are about to delegate your tasks with must possess an incredible work ethic and personality. You should ensure this part as they work closely with you, near the company’s primary internal force.

Don’t constantly check over their shoulders. After you delegate your task to your virtual assistant, kindly let them work independently. You don’t need to supervise them 24/7 and see if they are doing well or not. Just leave them the goals, a few reminders, and complete instructions. Then, let them do the work. Constantly sneaking into their mistakes would not make them very comfortable, preventing them from excelling in their job.

Let your virtual assistant shine. Instead of just giving them tasks and instructions, why not ask for their ideas, too? Of course, you will hire someone with skills and experiences in business operations. For sure, they have tiny or even huge ideas that can help you accomplish your goals. 

Give constructive feedback regularly. Your virtual assistant or employee is not perfect. They might have a few mistakes within the task you assigned them. It’s fine. You can still guide them by giving feedback. However, if they really did a great job, don’t hesitate to send appreciation to them. Always inspire these people and allow them to enjoy working with you.

It is not easy to delegate as it is hard who, where, when, what, and how you would assign tasks to specific individuals. Don’t worry, as promised. You are about to see the tool that has saved many entrepreneurs like you! 

A delegation matrix is a tool that helps entrepreneurs, leaders, and bosses in deciding which tasks to delegate and which to retain. It is a 4-quadrant table that measures the enjoyment of jobs on the y-axis and competence on the x-axis. To give you an overview, let me share what and how to do a delegation matrix.

Kaya Services created a template of a delegation matrix that you can use for your company. It aids you in creating tasks to keep and tasks to delegate.

There are four categories you need to remember in creating tasks for the delegation matrix.

1. Keep. This contains the tasks that you love doing.
2. Delegate. This contains the tasks that you like but can delegate to others.
3. Delegate. This contains the tasks that you hate and procrastinate do.
4. Delegate. This contains the tasks that you hate and know others can do them.

After listing all the tasks to each category, you can now plot them in the 4-quadrant delegation matrix to better view the tasks that you choose to keep and the tasks you want to delegate to your team members.

To learn more about the Kaya Services template on the Delegation Matrix, download the FREE pdf file. Get its full article on our website.