How to Manage a Virtual Office

This time last year, we were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to learn and find the best path forward for our families, businesses, jobs, and most importantly, our health and wellbeing – life was crazy, there were so many unknowns.

In mid-March 2020, the world stopped as we knew it, and in a blink of an eye, most businesses went from in-person brick and mortar offices to virtual Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Companies had to pivot in ways they never thought possible, conducting business from a virtual location – most often from home.  I say most businesses because Virtual Assistant companies were already operating like this.

But for businesses that were in-house, brick and mortar, everything changed.  For instance, have you noticed that many of the virtual call participants have their office wall behind them staged to look like an office – plants, books, family pictures all residing on a bookcase? Ordering online low-maintenance potted plants became the new must-have item. If you didn’t have a staged office, virtual backgrounds became the next hot item to use.

How does this tie into what we are chatting about? First, it shows that in 2019 thinking of the above office plants and virtual office backgrounds were not on our radar screens, but in 2020 and 2021, it became our new normal.

As we learn to work beyond the Coronavirus world, we may not be going back to “normal” in every area of business – but we will experience the “new next” normal.

And in this “new next” normal world, we must find new ways to communicate and create congruency amongst our virtual teams, and sometimes we found that it was challenging. We now find ourselves working from home at all hours of the day, seven days a week, all the while we are managing our families in the midst of it all.

With this new lifestyle that was thrust on us, we must find a way to balance business and life even more than ever, less we risk burnout, along with our mental wellbeing tested like never before.

There is a workforce ready to help you coordinate your team, reduce your hours and help you avoid burnout.

They have been working for years virtually and knew all the “tricks of the trade” way before the coronavirus normalized working remotely.  Who are these people, you might ask? Let me introduce you to the world of virtual assistants.

When working with a remote team, a virtual assistant who is already up and running will be your secret to success! You can delegate so many things to a VA and if you are partnering with a Virtual Assistant team, they can take you and your team to the next level, all the while reducing your hours and increasing your team’s productivity.

There are so many tasks a virtual assistant can do. So get into this mindset – if it can be done using a phone, tablet, computer and wifi access – it can most likely be handled by a virtual assistant!

When you run a remote office, there are many new tasks to consider: How will you communicate with each other? How and who will monitor it? How will you keep up with the latest apps that can streamline your virtual office? How will you handle the virtual project approval process? What about Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)? Who will update these? How about Zoom calls? Who will be the moderator? Email management? Calendar management? Content editing? Social media management and engagement? Graphic design? Newsletter creation and management? Bookkeeping? Customer Service? SEO? Website design, updates and management?

Wow, this is a long list! But here’s the kicker, for the right virtual assistant company, you can easily delegate these tasks to them, and they can quickly meet all of these needs. All the while not having to pay them a salary, benefits, or insurance. So not only does it save you time, VAs can be very economical to use.

Think of your virtual assistant team as an extension of you and your virtual team. It’s like you can run yourself through a copy machine. And even better, when you partner with a multi-VA team, think of how much you can duplicate yourself then! A good VA team pairs you with one contact person and from there, this person orchestrates and coordinates with all the team members on your behalf.

If COVD-19 taught us anything in the business world, it taught us that great talent could be found anywhere, just not in the four walls of any office building. You can truly do anything when you find talented and professional virtual assistants. They can scale and pivot quickly while keeping your budget in line.

Personal Touch Concierge Service®, LLC is a multi-VA team with 5 divisions:  Admin, Social Media, Website, SEO and Bookkeeping.  In our 14^th year of business, we offer Virtual Assistance with a Personal Touch!