Working with a team scattered across the world can bring both excitement and confusion. Some companies, because of the nature of their operations, insist that all VAs maintain the same working hours regardless of timezone, forcing VAs to work odd hours. However, when others allow their VAs to follow local schedules, it invites management difficulties.
Turns out, it’s all about communication. When you adopt and practice the proper communication habits, time zone differences become easy to manage. In fact, the time difference can even be an advantage, helping create a longer workflow that can stretch up to 24 hours and allow tasks to move faster.
In this article, we’ll show you how to communicate with virtual assistants in a remote team. You’ll learn some routines, steps, and tools to make international communication clear and effective. Let’s begin.
Know Their Time Zone And Working Hours
Understanding your VA’s time zone sets the stage for effective communication by helping you know their availability. Your morning may just be their evening. If you drop a message when they’ve logged out for the day, you’ll have to wait 12 hours for a reply. So, plan your messages that need instant responses during overlapping hours.
World clocks and time zone tools, like World Time Buddy, make it easy to see the time in different cities across the world. Here’s what it looks like when I compare the time in my city to that of an Israeli city (because Klarecon is based in Israel) and an Indian city (because I have colleagues in India):
Shared calendars are also helpful, as they help you see each other’s availability. Google Calendar is a popular option to try.
Set Clear Expectations From The Beginning
When onboarding any VA, you will need to explain your expected response times and communication channels, as well as other expectations, so they know what they’re getting into, and you can hold them accountable.
They may not be familiar with your channels, but if they don’t adjust, you will miss important messages. Also, your idea of a quick response may differ from theirs. For example, you may need urgent messages responded to within 15 minutes, but to some VAs, 30 minutes is enough. If you don’t establish such needs from the start, you’ll experience communication delays.
Build A Predictable Communication Routine
Your VA communication structure should also be predictable. VAs can get carried away with tasks, so improvised communication in such situations may cause them to miss important information. However, if they know when to expect certain updates or meetings, they will actively look out for them.
Suppose you’ve already informed your VAs that you’ll share daily priorities by 9:00 a.m. your time, hold a progress check-in via video call at 3:00 p.m., and expect a brief end-of-day summary when they log off. With those expectations set, they know when to look for direction, when to check in, and how to close out the day.
If the case is reversed, some won’t see the daily priorities on time, causing them to start late. Others may miss the meeting by 3 PM or join late. And finally, some may not see your request for updates on the day, leaving you to wait hours for a response.
Make Use Of Asynchronous Communication
Do you know that not all communication needs to happen in real time? Asynchronous communication happens through detailed text, image, audio, and video walkthroughs, created with sufficient questions and context to address confusion, even in the absence of the creator.
Besides mentioning objectives and expected outputs, also include examples of correct and incorrect results, along with any relevant resources they will need. Anticipate common questions and answer them upfront; and when you get new questions, provide answers to such in the next task.
Google Docs, Notion, and CRM tools help to store bulky text descriptions and easily update them securely. Their comment features allow team members to exchange questions and answers. When sharing tasks through a chat app, a voice note explaining the context is also helpful, as many people tend to express themselves better in voice than in text. Loom also allows you to save video walkthroughs and share them with team members.
Now, you can close for the day without constantly checking your work tools for questions from your VAs.
Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
VAs come from different backgrounds with different ideas of how things should be done or what makes a task good. However, their preferred way of doing things may not work for you, so you need to provide them with your own standard operating procedures (SOPs).
SOPs are manuals that outline the right way for your VA to work with you. They bring structure to remote work, help reduce mistakes, confusion, back-and-forths, and allow VAs to work independently. Some essential SOPs you must include are those for communication, task management, and onboarding & training.
A task-based SOP, for instance, may include details like:
- A clear statement of the task’s aims.
- Inclusions, exclusions, and any dependencies.
- Software, logins, and templates needed.
- Learning materials or data that the VA must gather or receive to perform the task correctly.
- Exact deliverables, formats, naming conventions, and quality standards.
- Sequential, actionable instructions for performing the task.
- Samples of correct work, incorrect work, and best practices to follow.
- Specific criteria or self-review steps the VA must complete before submitting work.
- When to update you, what constitutes a blocker, and escalation rules.
- Estimated completion time, deadlines, recurring frequency, and priorities.
With all these details, a VA rarely needs to reach out to the task assignor because the SOP covers most aspects, if not all. And if they still find a reason to, that clarification can be added to future SOPs to make the work smoother.
Be Clear, Specific, And Context-Rich In Your Instructions
“Update the ‘Client Onboarding Tracker’ in Google Sheets with onboarding statuses for clients who signed up from October 1–15. Pull details from Monday.com’s ‘Client Intake’ board and confirm email, contract, and kickoff call status. Mark any missing kickoff calls as ‘follow up required,’ tag me for missing info, and finish by 4 PM GMT before tomorrow’s leadership meeting.”
Read the instruction above and compare it with a vague one like, “Update the onboarding tracker with the latest client information and make notes where needed. Try to finish it soon so the team has the updated report.” It raises plenty of questions about what exactly needs to be updated, where to get the information, which clients to focus on, what details are required, etc.
VAs will either ask questions for clarification and waste time waiting for a response, or go ahead and do the task the best way they can, only to do a poor job, and you’ll spend time fixing or correcting their work. Time is wasted either way. Vague communication doesn’t favor anyone in remote work, while clear and contextual communication makes things smoother and saves hours.
Use Overlap Hours Wisely
If I, a Nigerian, share a team with an Indian, and we both work from 9 AM to 5 PM in our respective local times, the Indian resumes 4 hours and 30 minutes before I do, and we will only spend 3 hours and 30 minutes working together before they leave me to finish my remaining 4 hours and 30 minutes. Those 3 hours and 30 minutes we spent together are our overlapping time.
Overlapping hours are golden. They offer opportunities for real-time interactions with your teammates. These are also the best windows for calls or complex discussions, such as brainstorming sessions or reviewing work that needs immediate clarification—basically, any task that calls for quick back-and-forth.
Other tasks that can be handled independently, such as drafting reports, scheduling posts, organizing files, and conducting research, can be done outside shared working hours.
Build A Feedback Loop That Works Across Time Zones
Every VA needs feedback. It also provides clients and managers with an opportunity to share concerns and helps VAs adjust their methods to deliver better results. And since working across time zones means VAs may not always be available for instant feedback, a feedback system that works in your absence becomes necessary.
One of such systems is weekly reviews (daily or monthly works too, depending on the nature of your operations or the VA’s performance). You keep track of their issues and address them during a long meeting at the beginning or end of the week.
Another feedback method that helps is using task scorecards. Here, different aspects of each task are scored, so the VA knows the areas they performed well and where they did poorly. Assuming the task is to write an article, the task scorecard could separately rate factors such as grammar, structure, factual accuracy, punctuation, and flow on a scale of 1-5. Therefore, a writer instantly knows what to improve without any discussion with the client or manager.
No matter which method you choose, remember to keep the feedback positive, detailed (when possible), and consistent.
Encourage Autonomy And Decision-Making
When everything revolves around your approval, progress slows down. VAs need to wait for a client or manager, who may be busy with other high-level tasks or reviewing work by other VAs, before they can handle the next task. However, this won’t be the case if every VA could work autonomously.
As a client or manager, it’s up to you to encourage independence and autonomy. VAs who work independently deliver more results as they can move from task to task without delay. Also, they grow confident faster, which also increases their speed.
Autonomy usually grows through small, intentional steps rather than a sudden handoff. Start by letting VAs fully own low-risk tasks from start to finish, even if the outcome looks slightly different from how you would do it. Clear context, defined outcomes, and room to ask questions help build confidence quickly. Each successful decision also reinforces trust, making it easier to step back on the next task.
No matter how independent VAs work, some tasks still need your approval, so you should build a rule-of-thumb framework for decision-making. It helps VAs if they know which tasks they can decide on and which they must leave for your approval. You may let VAs decide on tasks that do not affect clients, budgets, or public-facing messages, and reserve decisions that affect them for yourself.
Keep Cultural And Communication Differences In Mind
International differences span from holidays to communication norms, such as tone and phrasing. Days that are normal to you may be observed as a national or cultural holiday for your VAs, and this may lead to their absence. Not understanding this makes you assume they’ll be available every day, and the absence may catch you off guard if you’re not the manager approving their leave days.
Besides cultural differences, there are also communication differences. For example, Country Navigator highlights several differences between Indians and Americans, including variations in patience and the directness of communication. A tone you consider normal could be offensive or kill another person’s morale. Or, your phrasing of an instruction could come off as a suggestion to someone else.
Learn about the different cultures you work with to avoid misunderstandings and improve team cooperation. You can always Google about different cultures or ask VAs directly, and adjust accordingly. Encourage team members to share the communication patterns they find uncomfortable so others can learn from them.
Lay down simple communication rules for your VAs as well. Finally, remind VAs that your communication style may differ as well, and that most gaps close naturally as everyone works together longer.
Review And Adjust The Workflow Regularly
Getting a perfect communication system when managing VAs in different time zones isn’t something you’ll achieve in a day, so you have to be open to adjusting. When you practice the above tips, you’ll notice some room for improvement. You may find gaps in your SOPs or face recurring misunderstandings about priorities and deadlines.
Schedule quarterly or monthly sessions to review your remote team communication system and identify ways to improve it. Plus, encourage VAs to flag issues early and suggest improvements, since they work in the system daily. Keep conducting these reviews until your system becomes efficient enough to go long periods without reviewing it.
Even Time Zones Can Be A Productivity Advantage
Many people fear working with VAs in different time zones, but most of them fly out the window when VA communication is done right. The points above will help you communicate with virtual assistants more effectively, even when in different time zones, and make the most of your working relationship with them.
Plus, when you master the process of communicating across countries efficiently, you can have a workflow that runs around the clock smoothly. This kind of system is also helpful for businesses that thrive better when they can run for 24 hours, such as those that rely on continuous customer engagement or offer global support coverage.
If you have ever been scared of working with remote VAs, here’s your sign to try it out. Communicate rightly, and the advantages will further convince you to keep it up.
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