Setting up a proper onboarding process for
your Virtual Assistant is the single most important thing that you can do to be successful
with that Virtual Assistant. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. And
if you're new around here my name is Jen Lehner. I'm a digital marketing and systems strategist
and I have helped hundreds of coaches, authors, small business people, solopreneurs, course
creators to exponentially grow their business by outsourcing the smart way and incorporating smart
systems into their business. So let's get going. Okay, so the first thing that I like to do when I
hire a new Virtual Assistant is send them over to Trello. Now you if you don't use Trello maybe use
Asana, it's fine.
If you just want to use a Google doc but basically you want to send them somewhere
where everything is laid out and you could sort of take them on a path like Welcome, Start here then
this then this. So in our case we have a Trello board and let's take a look at it now. So here's
a really simple but very effective onboarding template. We're using this in Trello and you could
do this in any sort of collaborative software even on a Google doc or you could do it in Asana.
The idea is that you want to take them somewhere where you can house lots of information and
where you can also communicate.
So the first thing that you'll see over here on the left is
Welcome and when we click into that you'll see an orientation video and which we're going to
talk about in a minute and then a tour of our Google drive and then we're asking the person to
sign the contract, right there. Then they can go down here where it says first steps. As you can
see here we've asked them to follow all of our social channels and then also to join Lastpass,
which is our password protection software. And then you'll see here there's information about
weekly meetings. We talk about the daily report card which you can click here to learn what that's
all about. And then we've got a column here for Resources and then a column for Daily tasks,
Weekly tasks, Monthly tasks. We're not going to get into this part on this video but there are are
other videos about this. Think about the worst job you ever had. Maybe it was all the way back when
you scooped ice cream or waited tables but usually it was the worst job because whoever was in charge
of onboarding you did a lousy job.
Maybe they didn't onboard you at all. Maybe they threw an
employee manual at you and said figure it out. And then you go out there and you can't do your best
because you don't know like how do I open the cash register, where are the keys, what's the code to
the snow cone machine, you know what I mean like people have to be set up for success to be
successful. And the good news is that's so easy for you to do. You want to welcome your new
VA with open arms because if you follow the Front Row CEO framework and sort of our methodology for
working with a virtual assistant then you know that this is not about a wham-bam thank you ma'am,
fly-by-night situation where you have a VA come in for two months and then you get another VA.
No, this is not the way we do business. What we do around here is we're looking for virtual
assistants who are going to be with us for years who are going to build relationships with who
are going to have a sense of ownership in our businesses and are going to be on board from the
get-go.
So they're going to be on board because we are going to onboard them properly and beautifully
and make them feel so welcome. So here's the first step in that process. All right so let's dig
in here and take a look at the welcome video and the orientation video. So this is sort of
a combination welcome and orientation video, if you have a good brand video it would be great
to plop that down there as well we just completed a new brand video. So I'll be adding that next
time we hire someone but let's just play this so you could get a feel for it. Welcome so who
is this company that you just signed on with? Well our mission at Jen Lehner Media is to
help entrepreneurs grow their audiences and their businesses using digital marketing,
outsourcing, and smart micro systems. We help them by providing premium online trainings
in the form of blog posts, podcasts, live streams, Amazon Alexa flash briefings, online
courses, live events, and videos. We have a free online community called the Front
Row membership site called, all right I'm going to pause.
And we're letting them know what our
number one priority is here. It says our number one priority is for to respond to our clients
immediately. If we can't respond immediately then as close to immediately as possible.
We talk about our inclusion and diversity values and we talk about how we value clarity and
basically so we're talking about our values here what's important to us, how our audience and our
clients and our customers expect, what they expect from us, and what I expect from us as a team and
so there's a lot of that like what are our values. We value excellence and attention to detail.
Mistakes happen but we want to make sure that we don't have typos, broken links, and other careless
errors as much as possible.
So I do a lot of that. Then we talk about our community and our clients
who are they, what do they look like, what's the demographic. Moving on into branding guidelines,
so we've included that in there as well. Our brand is playful but polished and there's quite a bit of
detail there. We show all of our different logos and our color palette and basically this is the
video that's going to let them know like what your company is about. And then in this video the tour
of Google drive we're just giving them that could be a tour of all of like your the back end of
your website, your Google drive, your social media but basically a tour of all the assets in your
company.
And also and I know this is what we did with our last hire is that we added to the welcome
video we got the whole team together on zoom to welcome this person specifically by name.
So we all got together and said Hey Sheilaine, you know welcome to the team. We're so excited
to have you! So that was just super short and sweet. Okay as I come back to my notes I
see there's some things we still did not cover. Why did I just take my glasses off? So one of
the things we do right from the get-go is we set up a new virtual assistant with a company
email address.
So it might be sally@jenlehner.com and this is so important because now your va can
use that email address in their work but again if your VA ever moves on all you have to do is shut
that email address off. And also you're able to stay connected with all the communications and
so forth. Some of the other things to talk about in your orientation video are your policies. What
are your policies with vacation leave? How should people communicate with you if they are sick?
What are the job specific goals for that that role and their key responsibilities? What's the
structure of the company like who does what inside your business even if you're just a
very small business with two or three people. Really good idea to show that I like to show
that graphically sort of so they could see like the hierarchy if you will. Don't forget
to introduce your new Virtual Assistant to your team right away. So even if the first
introduction is just via email and then you say, "Oh can't wait for you to meet everybody
face to face on our team meeting on Monday" but do it right away so they can be excited and
everybody knows that your new VA is coming in. And then you want to be clear and let them
know how they get paid, when they get paid, how much they're going to get paid.
And then what
your expectations are for working hours overtime, weekends. Do you expect them to work the weekends?
You know a lot of times people will put in their ads that they're looking for someone for 40
hours a week or 20 hours a week but does that include the weekends? Does it include holidays?
Do you need your Virtual Assistant to work during the hours that you're working? Actually that's
something and we talk about that in some other youtube videos and also in my program but that's
really something that needs to be sorted before you hire someone, right? Because if it's important
for you that they work during your working hours especially if you're hiring someone from the
Philippines for example, you know they're several hours ahead, half a day ahead and so that you
need to work that out in the interview process. And I think that just about covers it on
onboarding.
I hope you found this helpful and if you want to learn more if you want the templates
for all this, the templates for the contracts, the templates for all of it, I have a very
step-by-step program called Front Row Ceo. It's not open yet. It's going to open in March
and if you're ready and chomping at the bit to get started before then, we do have a self-study
option and we're going to have a really great three-day challenge coming up in February. So
we'll put a link down below so you could join that if you're interested. I'm going to teach
a whole bunch and if you have any suggestions comments or questions put them down below would
love to hear from you and I'll see you next time..
