Whether you are an entrepreneur, a start-up, or a small business owner, you surely aren’t afraid to do everything by yourself if you have to. And you have been doing it often, and it worked for sometime, but now, you know that you have to find a new way to sustain and reinvigorate the growth of your business.
And you have to do it without pushing your limits, burning out, and overspending your resources (including your employees). Virtual assistants can offer a new way.
Virtual assistants are experts who can take over your tasks and deliver excellent results while offering various kinds of flexibility and benefits no other service oriented business model can. Using virtual assistant also lets you and your in-house team reach new productivity levels previously impossible.
In this blog, we discuss how hiring virtual assistants boosts productivity and other crucial details. Let’s dive in.
How can virtual assistants make your team more productive?
To answer that in short, we can say that a virtual assistant helps a business avoid many issues that generally pop-up working with domestic agencies and in-house teams.
Now let’s take a detailed look how VAs enhance your and your team’s productivity:
1. Lets you focus on core tasks
You know that one of the biggest reasons why you cannot pay your best attention to the core tasks is the day-to-day recurring administrative and various operational tasks. You are forced to handle these admin tasks while tasks that translate directly to business growth stays untouched.
According to the Pareto Principle, there is an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. It specifies that 20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the consequences.
In your case, 20% of your tasks (the core business tasks) are responsible for generating the biggest possible impact (80%) on your business. However, if you cannot attend to that crucial 20% of tasks you are leaving most of your potential in the tank.
The ideal situation would be where you do not have to spend most of your time and energy completing the 80% of tasks that generate low (20%) impact and can do the opposite. If you hire a virtual assistant, you can make that a reality.
Yes, that’s what brand awareness can do for you. That out of the way, let’s focus on how to build it from scratch.
2. Lets you solve talent shortage
22 years ago, McKinsey & Company coined a term that is still extremely relevant for today’s recruiters and it’s showing no sign of stopping soon: ‘the war for talent’.
Today, fewer people are looking for work. You will only notice people under some financial pressure and those with less loyalty and tenure searching for jobs. And why won’t it be? Today’s ‘set it and forget it’ mentality goes well with the statistics that show only 29% of millennials are engaged in their jobs.
You, like everybody else, are facing a talent shortage. The only proactive action to take is to rethink how you approach talent retention, development, and acquisition. The one and only answer to the problem is improving engagement by making employee experience better.
Opting for virtual assistant services solves this problem the best way possible. You are getting access to a larger talent pool at a much lower rate. And, you are getting more opportunities to offer your in-house talent the employee experience they are looking for.
3. Removes multitasking
It is an established fact that human beings are not designed to excel at anything while multitasking. We are at our best when we are ‘mono-tasking’.
Do you know what happens to our brains when we multitask for a long duration? It tires our brains out (by burning oxygenated glucose too quickly) and makes it less efficient, impairing our focus even when we concentrate on a single task.
It makes us more prone to errors as it demands higher and higher brain power (triggering cortisol and adrenaline secretion) to complete tasks originally less demanding.
In short, when you and your employees can focus on one task at a time, you find better solutions to problems with a smarter and sharper mind.
One of the primary reasons and benefits of hiring a virtual assistant is that then you can offload some of the tasks weighing you down and relieve some pressure off your shoulders (and your brain too).
4. Helps reclaim work-life balance
First, ask yourself whether you feel that you have a good work-life balance or not. If you are a business owner you most likely don’t. Many also believe that the ‘balance’ goes away when you decide to own a business. But, we beg to differ.
Reclaiming work-life balance is important for you personally and professionally. Why? Because it is one of the most important components that will allow you and your team to go beyond the previous conceptions of productivity.
On top of that, the higher the involvement with the business the more blurred the line between personal and professional life gets. It results in higher stress levels, less focus with scrambled thinking, higher absenteeism, and poor productivity.
These are the reasons, managed virtual assistants are booming recently. They remove clutter from your work. By taking over stressful tasks they let you do more impactful work and open up more opportunities for you to invest time into your personal life and reclaim the balance.
5. Allows more breaks
Do you often find yourself planning to power through the day and continue working until you cover as much ground as possible? If you do, you’re not alone. This approach is more of an instinctive one than it is effective.
Making time for breaks is essential to keep your and your employees energy levels topped up. Many successful CEOs recommend taking power naps to keep minds sharp and focused. There’s a scientific study that finds day time naps to be more effective than caffeine in terms of helping with verbal memory, procedural motor skill, and perceptual learning.
One of the most important benefits of a virtual assistant is that it allows more breaks within a work-day. As you VA takes over routine and stressful work you and your employees have fewer tasks to worry about, enabling you to take the much needed breaks.
Essentially, it ensures that you are fresh through the work-day so that you don’t feel the need to procrastinate.
Final Thoughts
To get back on track, or become creative and highly productive, all you may need is a breather from all the stress that you accumulate switching from various types of tasks. Virtual assistants can easily offer you the extra pair of hands that can take over the burdensome tasks whenever necessary.
The benefits of working with virtual assistants goes beyond just doubling down on productivity. You can use their incredible skills to give your business a boost in any aspect you can think of. Basically, the possibilities are endless with virtual assistants.
