No one knows your business as you do. You are the expert on what makes it thrive, and what keeps it afloat. That's why it's so important to delegate tasks to others who can help you grow your company- whether that be through hiring a full-time employee or working with a virtual assistant. However, building trust with someone you've never met can be difficult.
Many business owners have a problem trusting people they can't see or touch. This is especially hard when you only communicate with them through email or other video technologies. It can be hard to trust someone you can't see or feel. Virtual assistants are people who work for you remotely, often in other countries. You may not be able to see or touch them, but that doesn't mean you can't trust them.
So how do you trust them? Why should you trust hiring a Virtual Assistant for your business? So for this episode, we will be going to dive into those questions. We will be talking about trust in building your team for your business.
Listen to the Episode
Atiba de Souza: Hey, welcome to the Build Your Team show. I am your host, Atiba, and today we're talking about trust. We're talking about trust in building your team for your business and specifically today, we're looking at virtual assistants. You know, those people who, they're not going to be working in your office or in your space, they're going to be remote. Sometimes even in other countries.
And how do you trust them? How? I mean, yeah. And for a lot of us as business owners, that's a major problem. Knowing who, I mean, heck let's face it, sometimes we have problems trusting the people that we can see and feel and touch much less with somebody that you can't see feel or touch, that you may only communicate through email or mostly through email. And then sometimes through zoom or other video technologies. How do you trust this person? Well, here's the deal guys. Number one, it starts off with your interview process, okay? And it starts off with the way you treat your interview process. If you treat your interview processes as you're trying to just hire a task monkey or you're just trying to hire someone who's low level, then that's what you're going to get.
Let's just be honest, okay? If you treat your interview process where it's like, okay, I'm just sifting through all of these people to try to find one who can do the job, then that's what you're gonna get. Somebody who can just do the job. However, if you treat your interview process and I'm talking about starting with your job description as an opportunity for you to market, to say to them, to communicate to someone who's reading your job description, who you are, what your company is like and what you actually value, then you have a much better chance at building trust.
So let me give you a realistic example. We have internally, you know, a culture code and we have things that we value internally, right? And in my job descriptions, I actually put our values in the job description and then describe what they mean. And so it's not just like two or three words, okay? Like, we value thought. That's one of the things that we value inside of, of, of, of my company. And so we describe, I described in the job description, what do I mean by valuing thought? I value curiosity. What do I mean by valuing curiosity?
I value putting others over yourself. Yeah, I say that! And so someone who's reading this, number one, if they don't value those things, they weed themselves out. Number two, if they respond and in their response to the, the job post, they're not referencing some of the things that I said I value, then I'm going to wonder, do you want a job or do you actually value the same things I do?
And so I'm looking in the interview process for people who value what we value. Because if you value what we value, then I know I can trust you. That's the first building block in trust. So you're asking, how do I trust the virtual assistant? It starts with you and it starts with what you're putting out there. And, and what you say that you value and sharing and communicating your actual values.
Now, once you get past that, and you've decided to hire someone, then yes. There's still a process of getting to know them and building that trust. And it's like any other relationship. You have to invest the time to get to know them. If you know this is the type of person, based on their job that they're going to be doing, that you need to give them keys to the castle, you know, passwords, and that type of thing, then you got to get to know the person. Spend time with them. When you're hiring them, know that in that first month with them, you're going to spend a lot of time with them or somebody on your team is going to spend a lot of time with them, getting to know them and getting to know who they really are, okay? Getting to know who they really are.
The next thing with, with this is that leads to great communication. So as you're getting to know them, you're building this bond of communication where they're going to feel comfortable to come and talk to you, going all the way back to what you value.
And then lastly, and this is the practical thing. This is the absolute practical thing. If you have to give someone keys to the kingdom, credit card numbers, passwords, that type of thing, keep track of the information that you give them. So the way I do them is I have a Google doc that is shared with them. If I've got to share passwords with you, I either do it in a Google doc or, you know, sometimes we use Trello. So I'll create a Trello board that has all of the passwords on it.
And so I know all of the passwords and everything that I have given to you. So if, and or when this relationship ends, I've got one place to go where I know these are all the things that I need to change. If you have my credit card, I know I got to go cancel that credit card. And it's that simple. It really, really is that simple, but it all starts with you.
You want to know how to hire someone that you can trust? Okay? And build that trust? That it starts in the interview process. And it starts with what you say in that job description about your company, who your company is and what you stand for. Because people who don't align with you, 99 times out of a hundred, they're not going to respond.
And the ones, those 1% who do respond, you'll be able to tell really quickly that all they did was a copy and paste job to respond to your, your job posts. And they're not actually the person you're looking for. You're looking for the person who values what you value and can articulate why that's important to them. Because then, you know you're going to be able to trust them.
All right, everybody! I hope that helps. This is my, that's one of my big tips of how, because with all of my VAs and all of my staff, I have great trust with all of them because that's where I start in my job description and what we value.
If you have any questions, drop them down below. Glad to answer them. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.
