How to Articulate Your Needs in a Virtual Setting
At Worxbee, our purpose is to help businesses thrive virtually. Worxbee Support is a place for businesses to find the highly skilled administrative support they need for long-term one on one support or short-term project-based work. We are often asked what contributes to overall success when it comes to working with a virtual team or Virtual Executive Assistant (VEA). Time and time again, it comes back to articulating your needs, communication, relationship building, establishing trust, and giving feedback.
Articulating needs is one area a large number of our clients struggle with. It is also step number one to a successful virtual relationship. As you work to build relationships, even through digital communication, your projects will be more successful, your teams will be happier, and the likelihood of future success with those virtual teams will increase. In this series, we will explore steps to articulate needs in a virtual setting:
Get clear on what you want. Identifying your needs is step one.
Be specific. Start off the conversation with a specific outcome or situation that you want to address. Try to make it as impersonal and objective as possible. Communicating from a place of calm will make the conversation more engaging.
State your needs. If you need a change in behavior or action, now is the time to speak up. Is there a certain step they are missing? Go over that step and why it is important to your support. Do they need to research a certain aspect of your industry? Assign that to them. Relying on mind reading to fulfill your objectives creates feelings of frustration and confusion which can lead to the deterioration of your professional relationship. To keep your working virtual relationship flourishing, you need to consistently make your needs clearly known.
Be consistent. Don't sweep it under the rug, hoping it will change on it's own. The best way to be consistent is to have scheduled weekly check-ins to articulate your needs and collaborate. Your projects, administrative needs, and business will continuously evolve and so will your needs. Keep your team members in the know by being consistent with communication.
Follow-up. Make sure to follow-up on your next call. A good way to remember to do this is to create a place for all of your team's action items from your call agenda. This way, it will be easy for everyone to be able to go back to and check off.
Remember, this is a two way street. Team members will also needs things from you for a thriving relationship. You will want to make sure they know they have your full support.
