Importance of Documentation: How A VA Can Help You

One of the reasons why you are driving behind a competitor is because you probably need to focus on leading the race. You may be too distracted with crying kids in the back seat, piling up missed calls on your mobile phone, and even trying to take a sip of your morning coffee. In this digital industry, you need to consider helping hands so you could put your attention to what's more important — rolling to success! 

It's time to let go of simple tasks or virtual assistant duties and let your inner control freak relax. Even if you can do anything, you can't do everything in this fast-paced world. 

Despite the fact that a majority of your business operates virtually, it doesn't mean that secretaries are no longer needed. If you, the business owner, have to keep track of all the nitty-gritty information, attend meetings, call clients, and locate files, it's possible to miss real opportunities. Considering to hire a virtual assistant is one of the investments you will truly feel glad about because of their flexibility and multiple skill sets. 

Businesses welcome lots of customers or clients, and each of them has inquiries or concerns that need to be dealt with. Leading a company will always involve customer interaction; however, you only need to attend to the most important affairs. Your virtual assistant can easily take charge of simple customer queries or bookings for you. 

Every professional and personal event in your life is important. Missing them will lead to broken relationships. You will never have to miss meetings or even your kid's recitals while you have someone setting up and sorting your appointments. Virtual assistants are experts with these tasks.

Lacking the creative side of your brain or simply don't have time to make presentations? Virtual assistants are skilled in using digital applications to help you create engaging and presentable reports for your clients. 

Virtual assistants can book anything for you. If you need to get to another country in less than an hour or you suddenly need to stay in the next city, let your assistant do the work for you.

As a busy bee, it's hard to track what's on your plate and keep everything from being mixed up. Organizing and sorting is a virtual assistant's most powerful asset. You could give them multiple tasks every day, and they never lose track of what is what. 

Now that you're all convinced that you definitely need a virtual assistant in your life, let's take a look at why documentation is something you're VA should be doing.

What is documentation in an organization?

Documentation in an organization refers to the records that business leaders keep and uses to inform wise decisions within the company. Your Virtual Assistant from the Philippines can document almost anything you'd like to keep for future references. This includes schedules to important policies, which means there are myriad types of documentation your VA can do for your company. And they all fall into three main kinds of documentation (team documentation, reference documentation, and project documentation.

Why is documentation an important part of an organization?

As a business owner, we get it; you're a busy bee, which means you need someone to handle recording your decisions, statuses, and repetitive tasks.

When documentation runs smoothly, it will be one of those things that you'll be grateful you did it. Whether a team member is suddenly absent or unsure how to take a step further with an unfamiliar initiative, records on your documentation will be undeniably helpful for you to make informed decisions.

Need more help convincing that documentation is one of your team's key projects that they should be focusing their attention on? Keep reading.

Why Documentation is Something Your VA Should implement Right Now

If your organization struggles with inefficiency in the middle of backend operation processes, documentation can ease those struggles.

Whether you've lost the person who knew how to do everything or the reconciliation and reporting process are disorganised, having a good documentation process will help you eliminate problems that you're experiencing.

Have you already started creating documented procedures? If so, when was the last time your team updated them?

Whether or not you have a good documentation process flow, in any circumstances your team will be facing, documentation will make a difference.

Here are some reasons why documentation is essential.

Documentation allows execution of the process to be smoother and more consistent.

There is always this possibility of forgetting something if you have a team performing tasks relying solely on their memory. For example, they may not remember specific points that you've discussed with them three weeks from now. This can be as little as creating backup files and as big as forgetting to update a current client about the changes in your workflow.

We're all human. And as humans, we all make mistakes. But if you have structured documentation in place, this will remind your team of things you can possibly miss out on.

By having that detailed guide, all you have to do is bring that out in a meeting. Your team can follow the instructions and expect a consistent and predictable outcome every time. The good thing is this is an accurate and error-free source of information.

Documentation cuts down duplicative work.

Are you tired of sticking out to a new long project only to find out that your team had done it before? This situation rarely applies to companies that hire VA for documentation. They leverage documentation to catalogue past projects, collect research, and as a source of information for avoiding wasting precious time in duplicative work.

Why change the wheel when you can just develop around and improvise work that's already happened? With documentation within reach, you can learn from past work instead of doing it repeatedly with the same results.

It makes employing and onboarding so much easier for the HR department.

It's tough to think that your most trusted employee is leaving, but the reality is that the team you get used to won't stay forever. People in business will hit the road, but you'll bring new people into the fold time and time again.

Onboarding a new team member is a daunting process. And unfortunately, according to Gallup, 12% of employees highly agree that their organization does an excellent job of onboarding new workers.

As a business leader, you want to educate and empower your team members to do their best performance, rather than making them feel like they're thrown in an ocean of sharks.

By prioritizing documentation, your team will have a sort of helpful guidelines, directions, past notes they can use as a reference to speed up in their roles. Plus, these resources can serve as their answers to their questions and figure things out independently. Rather than feeling like they need to ask someone in the team, they don't have to ask every single question with documentation in place they can rely upon.

A single source of the factual sheet makes everyone on the same page.

At work, knowledge is indeed some form of currency. If we're the person with all the answers to the questions, it provides us with a sense of confidence, as if we're the most irreplaceable employee in a work team. There will be some tendencies that we think sharing our expertise will make us less valuable for the team.

That's why it's a shocking surprise to learn about the survey we found. According to the study, around 60% of employees have had a bad time getting their workmates to share information crucial to their work.

Meanwhile, having a documentation process by your side increases your team's collective knowledge of everyone they are working with. When it comes to increased transparency of information for the team, you'll benefit well with documentation. A more collaborative and strategic culture makes smarter decisions because essential information is not locked away in a single person memory or one's person hard drive.

The documentation gives anyone fresh perspectives on operation processes.

Documentation is a step-by-step process, so every team member sees things differently when executing these steps according to memory and years of experience.

If you're building up documentation from scratch, you'll notice how much time it takes to produce a thorough, step-by-step operations guide. Transferring knowledge from your head into a detailed and informative hard copy is no easy task.

Taking pictures, screenshots, then documenting all the side notes, scenarios, exceptions to the rules, and warning messages requires multiple days of sitting. Having a virtual assistant from the Philippines is necessary if you do not want your team to be burdened by these tasks. Seriously consider hiring one if you're serious about reducing future operational risks.

How Can A Virtual Assistant Help You Out with Documentation Processes?

Because of the nature of how virtual assistants work, everyone thinks that they can't help you with your business documentation because they work remotely. In fact, whilst a virtual assistant from the Philippines might be limited to helping out with hard copy files, there are tons of things they can do to help you out.

Regardless of where you're at in your business process, virtual assistant services can help you organise and clean up your files. It doesn't matter if they are paper or electronic files stored in the cloud. Here's what a VA can do.

Hardcopy files

At some point, whether you have an office full of filing cabinets, or terabytes of information and resources, you'll have to deal with sorting out tons of paperwork.

Here's how a VA can help you

1. Starting an e-filing system for faster flow of information
2. Establish your organization with e-file instead of traditionally storing paper files by scanning documentation for you
3. Your VA can stick to the schedule to make sure your documents are updated regularly
4. Creating a system that will help you dispose of the old ones because it's taking too much space.
5. Your VA can help you create labels for files, so all you have to do is print what you need.
6. Your VA can do the dull and repetitive tasks of ordering supplies such as manila folders, suspension files, etc.

Digital copies

In today's world, most companies are going all paperless. They want most of their files stored in the cloud. Luckily, virtual assistants for hire can help you declutter and sort this out.

Here are some of the ways your VA can help you sort out your digital copies:

1. Your VA can use tags, categories, stars, and folders to organise your emails.
2. They can write autotext or develop templates for frequently used phrases and email replies.
3. A VA can make sure you have templates for different documents your organization is using.
4. A virtual assistant for hire can set up easy access to documents so you can address the essential files wherever you are in the world.

Don't drown yourself with a tedious amount of paperwork. All you have to do is to look for a virtual assistant you can trust to help you keep organised and stand on top of your pile of paperwork forever.

Are you having a hard time trying to put documentation in your workplace? Schedule a call with Kaya services now and start your 30-day free trial, and we will help you set up from A-Z!

There are tons of ways on how we can help you with documentation. It's just a matter of discussing your pain points over a phone call.

Kaya services is a virtual assistant hub that offers help for business people ready to leap to success.