What Should You Have Work from Home/Virtual Assistance Policy?

Work from home is a virtual assistance work that gives an employee a freedom to work from cafeteria, living room or where he feels comfortable and convenient to engage with job responsibilities and corporate commitments.

You may require a virtual assistant from India or anywhere to hire competencies that you hardly pay attention to because of the focus on cores. Simultaneously, you expect a lot about the hours he would put in and communication through a video chat, call or Skype. Apart from this, there is another big concern, i.e. Work from Home or Virtual Assistance Policy.

Let’s get through what it is, at first.

Work from Home or Virtual Assistance Policy

It represents an agreement between a virtual assistant and an employer, which reads rules, terms and conditions about how they would go ahead with remote work.

Why is it significant?

This is vital because it makes everything crystal clear about what, why, how, when and where to deliver of the project. In case these guidelines are missing, you won’t be able to define, manage and get everything corresponding to a defined workflow. The communication will be inefficient, which can cause a ton of discrepancies and hence, lead to redo every task from scratch. Likewise, delayed responses can interfere with quality and hamper the processing speed of your project.

A clear cut policy can curb all these challenges, boosting its productivity.

Define Eligibility for Who To Hire for Virtual Work

There are hundreds of outsourcing companies that offer remote work support. But, you cannot hire all of these. Neither can all be highly efficient who can effectively take charge with little supervision. So, you should pick up profiles with proven track of displaying good work ethics.

If the one is extremely organized, disciplined and innovated, he would be the best choice to hire for remote work. Make sure that he has seamless IT settings to host telework.

Besides, spend a few hours on deciding about all these:

• The roles for which you need advanced competencies from a remote assistant
• The total count of virtual employees you need
• The duration for which you need to hire, as for part-time or full time
• Training session and resources for adapting your company’s requirements

Clearly State Working Hours & Availability

Resilience is the best feature that you get as an advantage of virtual assistance. The employees have a choice to select the most productive hours to dedicate to the project.

Although it could be a can of worm to collaborate because of this flexibility, yet a clear guideline about telecommunication policy can make it possible. Create a mutual consent for a specific meeting time every day or weekly. Schedule the required working hours and availability for employees so that they can have a certain collaboration to perform efficiently

Specify these in the telecommunication policy:

• 9 to 5 working hours
• Particular check-in and check-out time together with schedules for breaks
• Schedule for tasks, which has flexibility and no need to have real-time communication

Company Policies for Telework

The IT settings are important when you are the outsourcing business. This streamlining would enable you to set up a code of conduct for every remote worker to stick to that Company Policies. This is likely to ensure productivity with efficiency.

You can put these points in your company policy:

• Set up a separate IT infrastructure, which should be flexible and have minimum distractions
• Formally dress up during working hours, video conferencing, meetings and client calls
• Strictly take breaks between work to avoid being resentful

Data Security Compliance

Data subject’s personal identifiable information is always a matter of serious concern. A small mistake can slap you with a whopping compensation claim worth millions of dollars. This can raise the chances of vulnerability or cyber security breach. But, this network should be protected and data security should come foremost.

Like GDPR, you should subtly highlight the data privacy and sharing compliance to strengthen their security. This is going to help you in mitigating risk of being trapped in legal issues or being a victim of cyber scam. Besides, the compensation and penalties should be loud and clear under disciplinary actions to be taken if invasion happens.

Explicitly include these terms & conditions:

• Avoid public WiFi for official purposes
• Work with a secure internet connection & connect with VPN
• Ask to wipe out official and confidential company’s data after delivery, which is sensitive
• Disallow sharing, transferring and keeping that data to prevent from mitigation in the future
• Don’t access applications, software or websites that are objectionable or violate company policies
• Provide reimbursement for internet bills

Guidelines for Legal Rights

Every remote worker should know about his legal rights. These may differ from country to country, which should be apparently put in the legal documents.

If you have some provisions of incentivizing or promoting opportunities, spotlight them as these can motivate them to produce quality & boost productivity. Clearly highlight the covers for liabilities in your telecommunication policy. Do share if you provide relaxation in taxes according to local tax laws.

Being a digital business strategist, Lovely has gained grounds in the digital transformation. He lets the performance speak about the plus and minus of what is done, which helps him drive to winning strategies over the internet.