How a Student VA Became One Employer’s Most Reliable Team Member

How Brett assigns tasks to his ofs. I recently had a podcast episode about hiring students in the Philippines and I discouraged it. In the Philippines, a college education is really, really important. Culturally, it's probably more important than in the US and so someone who's in college still and you try and hire them, they're going to, they're going to prioritize their education over your work, which can be acceptable if you have a solution to handle that, if you're prepared for it. It doesn't mean you can't hire a student. I got an interesting response from Brett about how he assigns tasks to his ofs, who is a student, and how he kind of how he handles her being a student. So I'm going to read what Brett sent to me because it's, I think it's a really valuable illustration of different ways that you can set up work with your ofs. So here's what Brett says. Just a word of encouragement. My VA full time student is exceptional. She works about 7. She never misses a task, is kind, and is way better at things she does than I ever was before I hired her. There are two reasons why the working relationship with her works so well that might be helpful to others. Number one, each task has seven days to be submitted. If something large comes up, she can move things around to accommodate other areas of her life, school, personal or anything. Certain recurring tasks are done daily and those tasks are predictable and she's able to accomplish some of them on her mobile phone. So I'm going to pause here. And I love that he gives her flexibility. Like you have seven days to do this task. That doesn't work in every business. But if there are things that, that you have that might, might be okay to not be done right now, it might be a good idea to give your OFS some guidance on how long they can take to complete this thing and give them that guidance as a general rule. Or maybe you, maybe you assign that, hey, this doesn't need to be done today, but let's get this done in the next four days. You know, it's a pretty simple thing to assign that timeline on each thing and a lot of project management systems will have that built in where you can assign a due date on something. I know on our basecamp we can assign a due date to tasks and I don't use that very often, but my team uses it all the time to assign, to remind themselves when things need to get done. So he continues now, number two, at the start of her onboarding, we met weekly to Establish a healthy working relationship built on honest, constructive feedback. While meeting with her, I was able to understand how to best set her up for success and she was able to understand the types of things that were important to me. By taking time personally to be about 14 days ahead of her, I can give her a heads up if a large project is coming and she can give me feedback if she'll be unable to do something so I can plan. This setup means neither of us are frustrated. It's an amazing win. So the end of Brett's email is telling and I think this is he's done with his solution. So his number one is he gives her time to accomplish tasks so she can shift stuff around. His number two is he spent time with her, bring her on board. So he understood her, she understood him and it set them up for long term work. Now his conclusion to his emails is telling. This won't work for everyone, but I think a lot can be accomplished by a part time va, even if they're in school. If you take the time to develop them as individuals and understand what will allow them to do the best work for you, my job has gotten easier and I'm accomplishing way more with her help. Actually, at this point I'm not sure how I would be able to run my business without someone like her. I hope this is helpful and insightful. Best Brett. So this is a, this is a great tip from Brett and I love how he emphasizes how you're hiring a human here. You're not just hiring a skill. When you hire someone, you're hiring the best person at SEO. You're hiring someone who's going to work with you and for you and someone who has desires, someone who wants to contribute, they want to do good work for you and you need to work on developing them as a, as a person, as an employee, developing their skills so that they can move up and make more money. They want to advance in life too. And Brett gets that and I love that from, I love that about what he's doing. So if you set your ofs up for success, they can do amazing things for you and with you.