4 Steps for Delegating | Hiring Your First (or Next) Virtual Assistant

Hey, everybody. Layla. Here I am preparing for post Covid craziness. I am preparing for a expansion of the team in the future here. I'm trying to think about what that's going to look like and I thought I would make a video to talk about how I am preparing for that. As someone who is so process obsessed, I mean, my business's name is process driven. If I don't have a process for bringing on new people, what am I doing? So I wanted to share with you the process I'm trying out for myself through this, you know, through this additional hire right now. And the process involves four steps and I want to share it with you. Not to say that it's perfect, but to say that's what I'm trying. So right now my number one step is documenting tasks. And I've been doing this for a while and you're seeing an example of it right here. Every task that needs to be done, creating a template. A task template in ClickUp is what I use or whatever it is you use, whatever works. Templating that task, the steps that you need to take to complete it, the information you need. If there's any video walkthroughs I have getting everything documented, then this is kind of what I'm in for. Most of my task, do the task with the documentation. So that means I'm going to be going in here and every time I set up a Gmail signature, I follow my own documentation. Entrepreneurs were the worst at this, actually following the rules we make. So I think that's a very important step and that's something I'm trying to eat, sleep and breathe my own documentation to make sure it makes sense. Because if I'm doing it and the instructions don't make sense to me, I feel I pity the person who comes after me and has to try to make sense of it when they're not even the person who created it. So creating this documentation, using it myself, then I'm. And this is the stage I've been just going through, bundling the documentation into job descriptions. And now you can do this either way. Job description to documentation or documentation to job description. But basically I'm figuring out which of these templates sum up the responsibilities of a role. So if my role is in charge of setting up all of our Gmail signatures, well, obviously this template belongs in their job description. And saying one of your responsibilities is setting up Gmail signatures. Maybe I have responsibility for this new person of being a community manager. And it might say manage rg, manage Facebook group and I might have some policies and procedures below that that repeat on a weekly or daily basis. Whatever is going into that job description, I want to make sure I have a documentation, a templated task, a living piece of policy and process that is able to be used to speak to each category of what's in their job description. When I was doing this phase, I kind of had to go back and forth of like, oh, I want this in their description, but I haven't made a process for it. All right, go into the process and then, oh, I have this process. I think that would be good for their description. Throw it in the description back and forth and back and forth until all of them were in both places. Right. Every piece in the job description was in the process and the process templates and all of the templates that I wanted to have in their role were listed in the job description. Makes sense, right? And now I am in stage four, which is stockpiling tasks to build a backlog for week one. So I've identified perhaps the 10 to 15 different templated tasks that are really going to make up the majority of their role. Not everything, because I can't predict everything, but those are the main things I think are going to take up the estimated amount of time I'm hiring for. So what I'm going to start doing is wherever possible, Facebook group probably not possible, but other areas I'm going to start stockpiling, meaning I'm going to let a backlog accrue of that task. So if it is, so if it is, this what we have on here, the setup of Gmail signatures, I'm going to let a backlog of one or two or three or four tasks just accumulate. I won't do them, just let them pile up. So that way when that person is starting, they've got a pile of work to keep them busy on. Week one or week two of things that are actually in their job description, help them get a running start and start diving in. When I'm approaching this, I'm trying to find the easiest tasks, the easiest templated things and just give them a lot of them, like Gmail signatures. If we need 15 of them, you know they're coming on your plate. If it's, you know, whatever that piece is, high volume of low complexity stuff. Because as someone who's coming on new to the team, I'm expecting them to have to be doing a lot of soft learning of the way we work and our approach and all that stuff. So I'm keeping the tasks Themselves very simple and repetitive. So you're building up that muscle memory and mastering them using our process. So that's what I'm doing right now. As I'm preparing to delegate. I'm following the four step process I just shared with you here. One, document tasks. Two, do the task with the documentation, no excuses, Layla. Three, bundle those tasks into a job description or vice versa. And four, stockpile the tasks so that in week one, my new person is going to have a healthy jumpstart of work to dig in and make really fast impact and contributions to the team. That's going to be in addition to onboarding and other get to know you stuff that of course they're going to need to be involved with, but the majority of it is going to be real work. Because my goal with hiring, especially as a small business, is to get people contributing as quickly as possible. I think it's good for them psychologically, it's good for me financially, it's good for everybody to just get everyone in with a running start. So that's my four step approach. I can't say it's perfect. I can't say I've done it a hundred times. I'm trying it out and I wanted to share it with you, one, to see what your feedback is and two, to see if maybe, maybe it helps some of you if you're trying to figure out how to delegate or how to just get started when it comes to hiring your first assistant or your 10th assistant, maybe this will be a helpful video for you to just consider. If you're someone who's been doing this a million times and you're listening to this process and you're like, Layla, you're missing a big thing. Leave me a comment. I would love to hear it, both personally and I'm sure everyone else would too. But for now, that's it for this video. Thank you guys so much for watching this little behind the scenes of stuff that I'm working on and I hope this was helpful. If you're interested in more videos around this, promise more of them. I know what I'm doing, but hey, sometimes you just gotta admit when you don't know. Be sure to hit subscribe and follow me on this journey. I'll let you know how the hiring goes and whether this process needs to change for the next time around. But that's it for this video. Thank you so much for watching and have a great rest of your day.