How to Conduct Remote Work Assessment?

Evaluating employees is essential as it allows you to take a clear look at their strengths and weaknesses. This is beneficial for both you and your workers as it would let you better use their potential and let your employees work on their weaknesses to become a more well-rounded professional. This does not change when you work with a remote team or virtual assistants.

Conducting remote work assessment is crucial when you have a virtual assistant. However, the process of assessing a remote employee can be much more complicated than the evaluation process for in-house employees. This blog aims to make this simple.

Here, we will discuss how employee evaluation should be changed for virtual workers, and how to conduct remote work assessments.

Let’s dive in.

Your virtual team is most likely in a very different setting than your in-house team. Therefore, the challenges they face are different and so should their evaluation parameters be. Isn’t it?

Keep these things in mind before you conduct a remote work assessment:

There can always be biases towards workers if you are not monitoring their performance everyday. For example, there is a chance that you develop an expectation of better work from a professional with good performance and view their evaluation favorably. You need to ensure that such biases do not impact your evaluation, decisions, or how you set new benchmarks.

As remote work relationships do not allow a lot of direct face-to-face communication, it lacks the depth of understanding that we get from pitch of voice, facial expressions, and body language cues. Therefore, you need to use video conferencing and one-on-one meetups as much as you feel necessary to establish a clear communication.

If you are offshore outsourcing your virtual assistant team can go through a host of problems that you and your in-house team would find hard to relate to. That is why it is wise to be open to listen to understand first and then to be understood. However, if you are working with a managed VA services provider, such complications will not arise.

If you are working with freelancers or virtual assistants that you have hired through contract agencies, there is a lot of weight this work assessment will bear. However, managed VA services can relieve you of these worries as they manage and assess their employees (your VAs) so that you always get the highest quality output.

If you are not working with a managed virtual assistant service provider you should consider the following points while conducting a remote employee assessment:

You may have been using time-tracking tools to make sure that your VA is as productive as can be. But depending on their workstyle ‘productivity’ displayed may differ from ‘quality’ delivered. You should consider ‘productivity’ of employees working on similar tasks to set a time benchmark for the desired ‘quality’.

Suppose you’re looking at employee performance in regard to customer service, you first need to determine how you’ll define when customers are satisfied with the service they are receiving. Communicating your expectations from the outset is necessary for your employees to strive to meet those standards. To learn more about why setting clear expectations is crucial with your VA, read our blog on that topic.

This assessment process is also an opportunity to show your remote assistants that they are more than just assets to your organization. To do this, you have to take a look at more than just their output.

For example, communicating with them about their overall job satisfaction, their pain points and their desired career trajectories will allow you to evaluate them not only as workers but as individuals which is essential in the long run.

Self evaluations, by nature, are unreliable, because employees may not be able to grasp all the factors that contribute to their success or failure and almost always need external support to unveil those. However, these evaluations can add value.

Apart from showing your virtual employees that their point of view matters, these evaluations also let you identify where the variety of perspectives match and differ. With insights into your employees’ minds you can create strategies to optimize performance.

Performance assessment is impossible without any objective data. To get this data you need to measure your virtual assistant’s performance against KPIs or a set of deliverables.

This can relate to their personal quarterly goals or organizational goals. For example, you can measure how much ‘time’ each remote employee has spent doing ‘productive’ work and compare it across workers in similar roles.

Employee performance evaluations are traditionally held annually. However, for remote work annual reviews are not ideal. Regular feedback from remote team managers is essential to bridge the remote workplace communication gap.

Frequent and short performance reviews are one of the best ways to do this. This allows your virtual employees to continually improve while the stress of these check-ins get lower and lower.

This reminds us of a blog about 9 tips for maximizing success with your first virtual assistant. Check it out.

This is a crucial part of conducting remote work assessments. During these evaluations make a point to listen to your virtual employees. By doing that you can help them deal with their struggles and adapt to the remote work lifestyle.

Apart from helping them overcome their issues you are making them feel values during the evaluation process which turns the performance review into a collaborative process.

Final thoughts

Conducting a remote task assessment is not going to be an easy task which is why many businesses choose to rely on managed VA service providers. However, if you are working with a team that needs to be managed by you, remote employee assessment has to be done right.

If you follow this brief guide and pay attention to each detail from defining KPIs to creating open communications you can be assured of better results for both you and your remote employees.

If you want to work with virtual assistants who are managed from the service provider’s end, you can schedule a meeting with us and talk about your requirements today!