Read our top tips for constructive feedback and get more from your outsourcing relationship!

At Get Ahead VA, we have a large team of virtual assistants to draw upon, so we can always find someone with the right skills and personality to work with your business. As such, we’re quietly confident you’ll develop a good working relationship with your VA and that the positive feedback you give will outweigh the negative!

VAs are professionals and are used to receiving comments, positive and negative, and acting upon them. For many reasons, it’s important to give feedback. When business owners withhold criticisms, it can result in issues going unresolved, ultimately causing the breakdown of the working relationship. And when business owners don’t show their appreciation, the VA might feel under-valued and less motivated. Fortunately, when you give useful feedback, it enables the VA to develop the work they are producing so they can support your business in the right way.

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In any other year, businesses would have booked their Christmas party back in August or so – big room, catering of some sort, maybe a magician visiting your table doing some close up magic. If you were really (un)lucky, someone might even have hired a karaoke machine.

But this year, it will all be different. Lockdown didn’t just introduce new restrictions; it introduced a new way of working. So many businesses have noticed how much easier remote working is that it’s looking like it’s here to stay, even when restrictions are finally over. What’s certain is that we’ll be having our works Christmas parties remotely, and we’re proud to report that our VAs with Zoom expertise are already receiving bookings to provide tech support during the virtual party season.

Here are some ideas for virtual Christmas parties!

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At the heart of Get Ahead VA is our brilliant team of virtual assistants (VAs). Based all over the country, they handle the jobs our clients send to us, and they bring their skills, experience and warmth to every project they work on. Get Ahead VA simply couldn’t exist without this hard-working team, and we’re delighted to have so many talented people working with us. 

As part of our 10th business birthday celebrations, we decided to spend some time celebrating our VAs. So without further ado, here are 10 reasons why we love our VAs, and why you will too. 

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No business could be a bigger fan of outsourcing than GetAheadVA. The regional directors and I practice what we preach, outsourcing our own business tasks within the team, freeing us up to connect with clients, do our own virtual assistant work and still have time to go for a run. If you’ve called us and we’re not there, you’ll have encountered our efficient phone answering service, and all those gorgeous infographics you’ve seen on LinkedIn were created by our own graphic design experts.

There are a number of excellent VAs who operate alone, but we firmly believe that VA agencies offer a more efficient, flexible service. In this blog, we look at why outsourcing to an agency makes sense for your business.

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It won’t have escaped your notice that coronavirus is having a huge effect on businesses, with direct implications for the retail and travel sectors. And as you’ll know if you manage a team of office-based staff, the effect of self-isolation is becoming apparent too. As more people choose to self-isolate, more team leaders are finding themselves having to manage people working from home, which can be a new experience, and not always an easy one.

Virtual assistants nearly always work from home. I’ve been managing my team of virtual assistants for nearly a decade – a lot of what I’ve learned may help other businesses as workplaces are forced to flex around coronavirus.

Here are my top tips:

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As a business owner, you probably already have a Company Page on LinkedIn, and you use it to share content, find contacts and get the word out about your business. But did you know that you can build your business’ social media presence by encouraging your staff to sign up too?

Of course, you can’t demand that your staff actively promote your business on their personal LinkedIn pages, but you can explain the benefits of doing so and provide some guidance that will help them to advocate for the business if they want to. To get you started, here are 4 reasons why it can be useful to link up with your employees on LinkedIn.

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