If you are a busy entrepreneur seizing business opportunities all the time, you can’t do everything by yourself. Imagine you need to schedule appointments with clients, make sales, create business strategies, respond to emails, answer phone calls, post on social media, and so on. This is a huge overload.
Many entrepreneurs find a solution to this issue by hiring personal assistants and outsourcing them several tasks. By optimizing and automating those tasks, they are able to focus on more important things such as planning business growth strategies.
But assistants also need to be managed. If you are wondering how to optimize your assistant’s workflow you can implement a business process management software.
Specifics of a Team of Assistants
Nowadays, you have the option to hire assistants on-site, as well as virtual ones. Did you know that virtual assistants could reduce your operating costs by 78%?
A team of assistants should support business owners on several tasks, such as:
- Responding to emails
- Research
- Helping out with presentations
- Taking phone calls
- Helping with social media, аnd more.
If your business grows big enough to hire a whole team of assistants, you might start facing several problems in terms of roles, responsibilities and lack of visibility. How to make sure your entire team stays on track? A SaaS Business Process Management (BPM) software might be a good fit for your business.
The software will give you full visibility across your whole team because you will be able to track delays, tasks and overall performance. This happens with assigning roles to your assistants, setting up repeatable tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and easily keeping an eye on the whole team.
Let’s examine in more detail how the SaaS BPM will shed light on your team of assistant’s performance to increase productivity and optimize internal processes.
Assigning Roles to Each Team Member
Each assistant from your team should have a clear understanding of what its role in the company is. When you create a new role, you need to add a description. Everyone in the company, not only the assistant, should have no doubts about their role and responsibilities in the organization.
If they don’t have information about what’s expected from them, this could lead to bad performance, miscommunication and frustrations.
As the above example from the SaaS software shows, you can create different roles across your organization. As an example, we’ve created a Social Media Assistant role and we’ve written a brief description.
When you hire an assistant to manage your social media accounts, it will be clear for the new hires that they should be responsible for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms that can be added at a later time.
Set Repeatable Tasks and Automated Activities
Creating repeatable tasks or activities will prevent future errors, delays, or overdue tasks. When you’ve got tasks triggering off of due dates, you’re taking a step away from relying on your memory or sticky notes on your desk. Also, it will save time because you need to create a repeatable task, add a due date, assign it to your assignee, and don’t worry about it anymore.
Let’s see how this works using SaaS BPM.
Once you’ve created a role, you can assign it to the respective person from the team who is hired for this particular job.
In SaaS BPM you can create activities and assign them to the responsible assistant. You are able to set repeatable activities on a daily, weekly and monthly basis with recurring dates.
Check the screenshot to see how to assign the activity to your teammates. The Social Media Assistant has one activity that needs to be completed every day – to post on Facebook.
After creating the activity, you choose task duration. In this case, posting on Facebook should take 45 minutes. Then you may schedule the task to be completed before a certain time – in this example- at 11 am.
You can assign the activity to the Social Media Assistant who should create posts for Facebook every day and post at 11 am. Once its done the assistant can mark the task as completed.
Improved Reporting and Visibility on Tasks Completion
Visibility and transparency are critical factors for managing teams and keeping team members on track for projects and daily tasks. With BPM software, entrepreneurs or managers can monitor if their teams are on track with their to-do lists and complete their assignments on time.
If there are tasks that are delayed by team members, there could be a problem with the workflow if it’s outdated or a new team member needs to be onboarded. The clear overview of task completion will give management valuable insights on how they can optimize their processes internally.
Switch Responsibilities and Roles Between Assistants
When you have a clear distribution of your team of assistant’s responsibilities, you will have a better overview of the workflow and adjust it when needed.
For example, if someone from your team needs to take a couple of sick leave days, you can easily transfer the activities to another teammate.
You have a list of all activities and teammates you can filter per activity, user or role. Then you can assign the activities to one assistant to another one quickly without losing track of the workflows, goals, or causing stress in your team.
Collecting Data and Files Easily
If the process requires sharing content on social media, updating blog posts, creating videos, or sharing files across teams, it would be easier to have them in one place.
If we use the example with the Social Media Assistant, who needs to post every day on Facebook, this will require coordination between the designer and the copywriter. They should also have repeatable tasks for Facebook posts, so they won’t forget about them.
Wrapping up
In this article, we’ve focused on how the SaaS BPM can benefit entrepreneurs or business owners and their team of assistants. As the software focuses on recurring processes, this will help you build transparency, visibility, and a clear overview of the whole company.
Managing a team of assistants can be challenging in terms of coordination and communication between them. You can create daily checklists, repeatable tasks and set goals. This way, you will make sure the deadlines are met and the workflow works smoothly. Start your journey now.