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Working parents will have even more on their plate as schools shift to remote learning as part of their COVID-19 precautions. Not only will parents have to balance working at home with family time and parental responsibilities. Now they will have to play a greater role in their children’s education. They’ll have to serve as assistant teachers, since there’s only so much the actual teachers can do through Zoom classes. So parents will need all the help they can get, and this is where Virtual Assistants come in. 

Helping Out With the Business

If these working parents already utilize Virtual Assistants in their business operations, then the VAs will probably have to take up more roles. Parents who are working at home might have to take some more time off from their business. And put in more time with their kids, helping out with their classes and with homework. Moreover, single parents will be affected to a greater degree. So Virtual Assistants can be major lifesavers in these situations. 

Running businesses without the help of VAs? Now would be a good time to enlist the services of one. Ideally, they should hire their Virtual Assistant or Virtual Team before the remote classes start. So that they can go through the process of orienting and assessing their VAs before they have to spend more time helping out with remote learning. You don’t want to balance evaluating a VA *and* your kids’ Zoom classes.

General Assistance and Organizing 

Transcending the virtual workplace, VAs can also help parents with the sheer mental load and effort of keeping households running smoothly. It is already by default a challenge in ordinary times. Now in the time of coronavirus, it is even more challenging. More people at home all the time means more cleaning. More meals at home means more groceries and deliveries. Organizing the logistics of all this will be an even bigger headache especially when one is also working from home. So Virtual Assistant services will prove invaluable with tasks like handling emails, organizing travel and transportation details, scheduling and financial number crunching.

Virtual Assistants Need Reinforcements?

For those already utilizing VA services, they might consider expanding those services and even hiring more Virtual Assistants. Even whole Virtual Teams. Why? Because all these concerns working parents are facing are also the realities of their Virtual Assistants. As VAs handle increased workloads, they also have to balance this with their families’ requirements. Imagine accounting VAs crunching a clients’ financial numbers before helping out their little ones’ math assignments. 

So, some consideration may be in order. More businesses will need to outsource and utilize Virtual Assistant services, but an individual VA can only handle so much. Hiring more, expanding to a Virtual Team, will result in drastically improved services. Especially if generalist VAs are teamed up with specialist ones. So not only will they handle higher workloads but their capabilities will also be enhanced and diversified. This will translate to improved and expanded business services. For example, working parents who are thinking of scaling up their online business would do well to hire Virtual Assistants skilled in website design and development to improve their business webpages’ layout and functionality. Increased sales and transactions might result in numbers that a generalist VA might not handle, requiring a dedicated accounting or bookkeeping VA. And so on.

Takeaway

The shift to remote learning and other measures and precautions have advantages and drawbacks. And individuals, working parents, entrepreneurs and family units have to adapt. Likewise with the Virtual Assistants themselves. We all have to figure out how to not just bear with current conditions but make things work in the best way possible. But we don’t have to go at it solo, because we aren’t alone. There is always help available.