How do you monitor the work of your virtual assistant?

Every VA works at their own pace. You always need to be clear with them what your expectations are.

For your first VA venture, hire per project, and hire a few to do the same tasks but for different sites and see how each of them fare to give you an estimate on what's an average time to complete.

You have to be understanding, there are things your VA will be good at and things they are not good at. And how fast they do things will vary.

I have several VA's in my office one can churn out 8 tech articles per day, but can barely do 4 generic ones. One takes forever re-writing articles, but can create fresh articles with no problem. It all really depends on their skillset and background.

If you can afford it, I think it's best to hire VAs on a full time basis. For the most part, Filipino VAs are honest and will give you8 hours worth of work as long as you give them precise instructions and challenging projects to work on. I think giving them training would also be a good investment. That way, they'll develop new skills as they're doing work for you.

As for monitoring their work, there are a lot of options available. The best one so far is Tracklabor.com. It tracks every app, every web page your employee has opened, down to the very last second.

Wow looks like Tracklabor is a gold a mine. I'm going to start using this today. Once I get into the office there are going to be some immediate changes. As far as paying VA I would stick to paying per project until you've spent enough time dealing with them to know how fast they work and what they can do in the time they have available.

Yeah, I think that trying to track remote team members (of any sort) on a per-hour basis is a great way to get frustrated. I just do it by project/task. That way, when it's completed I pay and if it's not I don't. Simple and keeps me sane.

The most important thing before you hire a VA is to discuss your requirements.

-WORKING HOURS PER DAY/ WEEK
-WHAT ARE YOUR TARGET OUTPUT
-UPDATES
-REPORTS

Based on my experience, it really works well if you ask them to submit a report at the end of the day, or at least at the end of the week.

And on their daily shift, be open to communicate with your VA thru chat or email. Because sometimes, there are a lot of questions or there are things that needs to be clarified. So to avoid serious problem, ask your VA to communicate with you on their shift.

Thanks guys for all your suggestions. I decided to hire a VA on a per project basis. Odesk is really a very good medium that I discovered lately.

The best way doing it is to hire a VA for few hours of mock up, Gauging the progress per hour and make a deal on hourly/fixed price accordingly.

If the per hour progress was expensive you may give contractor an offer with a rate that suits you or let him/her work on fixed price.

High potential VA's (specifically) will prefer working hourly basis and will not go for fixed price. (thats what I have see and what I do being an agency owner having 100+ agency contractors)

I go to the other end of the house and see what she's doing.

Theoretically she is virtual since I can't see her from my office.
Ah - she is now cooking dinner. Gotta go.

Demand daily quotas. Pay for RESULTS not excuses.

Pay if you only have results with it. Ask for Reports

Not all VAs are equal. There are those who can do the tasks as instructed without you micro-managing them. And then there are those who need to utilize tools to keep focused. We do work with virtual assistants, and we find that by using time-tracking apps with screenshots, such as our very own, our VAs generally get more stuff done.

Both Elance and Odesk have monitoring tools for hourly contracts. You can view the screenshots to see what they're working on and how long it takes them complete a task.

VA - like any other employee - HAS to be managed. The virtual nature makes it pretty difficult to monitor and manage remotely, So after years of working with different VAs, I decided to pay ONLY per results. I have paid in the past for too many "floods" and "outages"...
I have a rate (fair rate) for an article, no matter how long, and I only pay after editing and approving it.
I have a rate for 1 full day work - and I define the tasks according to what I would expect myself to accomplish in 1 day - sometimes I adjust it to VA capabilities.... some of them provide quantity ... other quality.....
I pay per hour only to high quality, expensive contractors - like I never cheap on good editor. The high-end contractors usually very reliable and fast, I never find any problems with their hour report.
If you decide to go for full time VA - insist on DAILY report. The person who fail to submit it to you several time - just let him/her go....
One more tip - I only work with people who talk with me on Skype. There are lot of agencies who pretend to be 1 person, specially in the east - and you getting very low quality at the end.
If you consider to work with VA from Philippines - just look how other business owners describe the requirements at the onlinejobs dot ph site. Go to the "job search" You will learn a lot from it