For startups and small operations, virtual assistants can be vital.

The general idea is: instead of hiring a full-time specialist or wasting time on data entry, you hire a VA.

It sounds easy. You just hire a VA, right?!

But what happens after that is the hard part. Straight after hiring comes the onboarding and training. That’s the part where you get your new VA up to speed with how your company works, and how the tasks, rules, and responsibilities are going to be different from the other companies they’ve worked for.

You’ll need to explain how to use your stack of tools, and how they can work as efficiently as possible. It’s also a process for you: you need to remember to check in, make sure everything’s set up properly, and review their performance.

In this post, I’m going to go over some of the key things to keep in mind when onboarding a virtual assistant, and share two of our internal processes with you.

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Alarm goes off. “Five more minutes”. Snooze. Sleep. Repeat until you’re late.

Ignoring your alarm repeatedly creates a habit, and habits are hard to break. You start to ignore it more and more because you’ve conditioned yourself to do so. Even if you want to get up early, your subconscious is working against you.

Small snoozes quickly add up too – just 15 minutes each day sends 91 productive hours down the drain every year. That’s more than two working weeks you waste each year.

Knowing how to wake up early is only half the battle – to start your day the right way, you need to make it an automatic reaction to your alarm.

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It’s not always easy to know whether your team is doing everything you ask them to. How do you know everything is on track? Are you sure your team is taking care of every responsibility?

Here’s the worrying thing:

According to the American Management Association, 21% of companies believe that 30-50% of their employees shirk from their responsibilities. This is stupidly high. So, we need to see how it can be resolved and take action right now.

Accountability in the workplace, in short, refers to your team members taking responsibility for their actions and for the tasks they’ve been assigned.

In this post, I’m going to cover 4 key areas which pertain to managing the accountability of employees:

• Communication and company culture
• Productivity
• Clear processes and workflows
• Oversight

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Over the last year working remotely at Process Street, I’ve been researching as I go. I survived on dumb luck and baseline writing skills.

However, in the last 30 days I’ve built a system to teach myself how to read more. I’ve built up a library of articles, authors, quotes, books, tips, and ideas I can draw upon whenever I need to write or find the motivation to keep going.

The best part is that I spent next to no extra time outside of work in order to do this, and it all boils down to five elements:

• Filling dead air with podcasts
• Setting up an RSS feed
• Always having a book on the go
• Productively procrastinating
• Following 50 people on Twitter

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Ah, procrastination, we meet again. For all of my talk on how to improve productivity, to a certain degree I find it impossible to permanently find the answer for how to stop procrastinating.

What I can do, though, is explain why we procrastinate and give some tips to some out on top as much as possible.
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Productivity is great. The more productive you are, the quicker you work. The quicker you work, the more you get done. The more you get done, the better you’ll feel about the time you’ve spent and the more important you’ll become to your team or company.

Unfortunately, humans can’t work like machines, and so you’ll need a bit of help from technology to work at your most effective pace. From experience, testing, and research, we here at Process Street have collected the 30 best productivity apps ever created for you to cut through your workload.

Now, I’m not saying that you should use all of them; that would defeat the point of streamlining your workflow and optimizing your day. Instead, these productivity apps are best used by picking one or two from each category.
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Working at a startup, you can often feel like you’re lost in space — thrown into the unknown, feeling lost and confused.

It’s a strange world, and something you have to quickly adjust to if you’re going to survive. The hours are longer, the workflow is intense and the expectations are like nothing you’ll have known before.

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You need a solid writing app.

It’s vital for practically every kind of company—whether it’s for drafting contracts, writing up website content, or just putting together internal documentation.

But team collaboration can easily become a huge nuisance.

The more people involved, the more difficult it can be to decide on the right edits and produce a coherent piece. That means the last thing you want is even more trouble dealing with a collaboration tool that doesn’t fit your workflow.

We delved into the features of three popular collaborative writing apps—Quip, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs—to help you decide upon which is best for your team.

In this post, we’re going to compare each app’s features in the fields of:

• Sharing
• Concurrent editing
• Revision history
• Chatting and commenting
• Organization

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HR processes are often overlooked in a company. No matter how big or small that company is, HR responsibilities are extremely important. An organization cannot build a good team of working professionals without good HR.

The key purposes of the Human Resources team include; recruiting, training, performance appraisals, motivating employees as well as workplace communication, workplace safety, employee relations, and much more.

Over at Process Street, we have created 6 HR templates to help you keep on top of your HR. These processes can be used daily, but some of them are better used less often than others. They piled with information to help you improve Human Resource processes within your company.

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Two weeks ago I had a brainstorm with my team to think of how to improve productivity; the 4 ideas we came up with increased my output by 375% and ensured that I no longer resort to 70 hour work weeks. Obviously, this was just too good to keep to the Process Street team alone, so stick around if you want to find out how I did it!

‘Being more productive can have an awesome positive effect on the rest of your life as you start to feel generally more positive due to lower stress levels and more free time to do what you really love to do.’ – Dr Jones

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