I currently have 4 “virtual assistants” on oDesk (by VA I mean personal assistant, programmer, designer, etc.) and each has very different degrees of skills and the ability to know exactly what I want from them.

I’ve also worked with many different virtual assistants over the years. Each has had very diverse skills, experience, and personalities (much of which I’ve found can be formed by local culture). One of the things I’ve struggled with is finding the perfect balance between a virtual assistant that takes the right amount of initiative… not too much, and not too little.

What do I mean? Well, I’ve found that in some cases, initiative and following explicit instructions can be mutually exclusive. Still not sure what I mean? Maybe a few examples will help from two virtual personal assistants I had last year:

Example 1) Explicit Direction Following – This VA would methodically read all the directions I sent him and would follow each on to a perfect T! If I had a spelling mistake in a form letter, he’d send it out (knowing it was spelled wrong). If I had him doing customer support he would answer every single email exactly how I instructed… which was great if I had provided instructions. In cases that I hadn’t written explicit instructions he would wait for me to tell him exactly how to respond to the question. Even in cased I felt he could easily answer, he wouldn’t take initiative without explicit instructions. It seemed he didn’t want to risk doing anything other than EXACTLY what I explicitly instructed. If there was even a tiny question about how to proceed he’d wait to begin the project until I was able to return answers to all his detailed question. This often meant another 48 hours added to the start of the project because of the different time zones. I found myself saying, “Gosh man! Take some initiative!”

Example 2) Too Much Initiative – My second VA was almost completely opposite. A very similar skill set as the first, but approached instructions in a very different manner. I’d send over a project and before I knew it, the project was under way. She worked quickly to accomplish the tasks set in front of her. She’d even try to anticipate my needs and insert a few of her own ideas into the completion of the project. I really admired her initiative, but she occasionally missed the mark causing more work for me or needing the project to be done again “correctly”. I found myself saying, “Dang it… just follow my instructions!”

Of course you will eventually find that hidden treasure of a VA that possesses the perfect skillset, experience, and balance of following instructions and initiative. I’m lucky that I think I currently have a virtual assistant like this. Here’s just one example of how he’s struck this balance:

One of the biggest tasks for my VA’s is to do customer support for one of my websites. I have about 20 pre-defined questions / answers for him to use in answering questions (yes, we have an FAQ, but we can’t get 100% of our customers to read them no matter how much we try to force them to read it). In the beginning he answered questions exactly as I instructed and any other questions he’s escalate to me. As I answered the escalated questions he’d read and learn and incorporate these into his support. There was one question he escalated to me and I answered. He then started answering the questions himself. Here’s the best part: After about 15 times receiving and answering the same question over and over he took perfect initiative and added the question and answer to our FAQ system and sent me a note asking that I review it. WOW!

Do you want a virtual assistant that does exactly what you instruct and not deviate, or one that will use take initiative and run through a project while anticipating what you want done? If you’re like me, you want the perfect balance.

So, what’s your experience?

I’ve been very impressed with my most recent virtual assistant from oDesk. His English is better than most I’ve used, and he mentioned that he enjoys writing. I asked if he’d write a quick bit about his background and experience / thoughts on using oDesk, so here it is:

“oDesk was recommended by a friend whose office mate happens to be a longtime oDesk provider . I registered at oDesk the day after I was told about it but it would take about four months before working on my very first project.

Prior to becoming an oDesk provider, I was working full-time on a tech support day job; one of the easiest and most laid-back 9-5 jobs one would ever work on, in my opinion. However, being more than fifty miles away from family plus the all the money wasted on unreasonable travel and lodging expenses for five years, I have decided to go home to my family away from the big city and begin a new career. What the new career might be I had absolutely no idea; opportunities for employment back home has become quite scarce and there was the risk of becoming unemployed indefinitely as soon as I leave my then employer.

A week before my intended resignation date, I turned to oDesk again for part-time work opportunities with the hope of filling in some financial gaps that would be left behind upon leaving. With patience and a bit of luck, I managed to land my first oDesk project (and my very first as a freelancer) on my final day as a 9-5 employee. The project handed to me was a fairly easy web directory management stint that would eventually become full-time work, eliminating worries of becoming jobless after resigning from my day job. Nearly a couple of years after winning the bid, I remain associated with the same buyer and project that launched my freelancing career and opened the door to other long-term work within oDesk and at the comfort of home.

You cannot go wrong for choosing oDesk because of their guaranteed-payment system and, because of their reputation as one of the pioneers of the online outsourcing industry, an extensive job market and a huge buyer-provider community. In addition, the method of receiving payment via the Payoneer MasterCard has probably the lowest fees among the payment channels available. The proficiency tests, work history, and feedback feedback feature help establish (or improve) your reputation en route to more projects and higher pay rate.

What, perhaps, gives oDesk the upper hand among the competition is its prized oDesk Team software, a downloadable standalone program that gives providers the payment guarantee for hourly work and easy project monitoring (and peace of mind) for the buyer. The program is available for platforms like Windows to the most popular of Linux distributions.

For those about to start their freelancing stint with oDesk, however, it would be very helpful to have a complete (and, as much as possible, comprehensive) profile, take several proficiency tests suited to your skills (and take these tests seriously), and trivial as it may seem, attach an appropriate photo to your profile. Upon registering, you will also be given a two-week trial access to the oDesk Team software for the chance to familiarize yourself with its important features and explore the overall oDesk working environment. After the trial period, the only time you get to access oDesk Team again is when you get hired for your first oDesk assignment.”

I appreciate the remarks provided by my VA above and really enjoy reading first hand experiences.  I love working from home and am happy that I can help others enjoy the same opportunity.

One thing that came to mind when reading the story above is how frequently I see really poor resumes and information posted by potential providers in their oDesk profiles. I think many would be able to get much better assignments and rates if they spend a little more time polishing up their profiles which make or break a potential job opportunity.  I’d love to see a provider offer a “profile polishing” service to other providers!Â

Here are a few of my thoughts while watching it:

• Transparent work:  I expect that as this happens, employees will have the option to telecommute more.
• From an employer point of view, the additional layers of transparent work will definitely translate to much more efficient labor spending.
• From an employee point of view this could be viewed as micromanagement if not utilized properly.
• The world has been becoming more “flat” and the same is happening to organizations.
• The video mentioned JetBlue utilizing a call center workforce that works from home.  My cousin in the US works for JetBlue from home and loves his job.
• There will be a lot more competition for jobs and quantification of skills.  Fewer and fewer people will be able to get away with being the company slacker.  Conversely, those with the skills and work ethic will thrive in this new “paradigm shift”.
• Crowdsourcing: Interesting they mention this since I’ve been so immersed in this area for the past few weeks.  I’m very curious if oDesk has / is moving into this space (at least by in the way I define it as one-t0-MANY vs. the traditional one-to-one or one-to-a-few).
• Virtual teams:  The video says these groups of contractors may or may not work again in the future.  I think this will work efficiently in some areas, but in others it will still be more effective to develop and build long term trust while getting a feel for your teammates style, strengths, weaknesses, etc.

• Outsourcing isn’t going away any time soon.  We all (employers / employees) need to be ready for it.

What do you think?  Are the predictions and statements in the video accurate?  How do you feel about this so called “Future of Work”?

A few weeks ago I dipped my toe into, and wrote about my first experience with the Amazon Mechanical Turk system.   Compared to my normal virtual assistant projects I never had a single conversation with the provider.  I didn’t know their name, skill-set, background, geo location, nothing.    Well, for fun I decided I’d post a “HIT” (project on “MTurk”) asking for a provider to write about their background and experience working with this system.   Below is what I received, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing:

“My experience as a remote virtual assistant (Mturker)

First a little background about myself. I’m 37 years old, male, originally born in Taiwan but emigrated to the UK at the age of 10. I’d say my formative years were spent in the UK, but of course I still had it in me to relocate back to Taiwan later on (more about this later). I went through the UK education system completing a BSc. in Management and a MSc. in Information Systems. I then had an IT career in the UK and Europe, working for mostly large blue chip multinationals such as Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), EDS (now part of HP), BP and Pfizer. Most of these roles were short term contract roles, usually rolling contracts that were extended every 3 to 6 months, working on projects that on average lasted 1 to 2 years. So with this background in IT, and used to working on short term contract projects with more than 10 years of cumulative experience, I guess I’m more used to working as a remote virtual assistant than anyone else.

This was not the only reason I chose to become a remote virtual assistant, however. In 2006, due to personal reasons (I guess also mainly due to the fact that my wife is Taiwanese and her parents and long time friends are still in Taiwan), I relocated back to Taiwan. It was a big reverse culture shock at first, but eventually I managed to adjust to a different lifestyle and also different working environments. Although English was a major element of what was needed at work, I wouldn’t say you’d be able to find a completely immersive English environment in Taiwan. In order to keep up my proficiency, I would seek good English media (TV, radio, press, magazines and books) and of course actively seek out opportunities to practice English, but I still felt that over time, it can only deteriorate rather than improve.

Working for Mturk was also a great way to retain my proficiency. Most tasks (at least the ones that I enjoy!) involve some form of writing or composition (like this one!) and most tasks specify that you need to be a native and good English speaker to complete the tasks. So as well as practicing my English, I also get the opportunity to earn some pocket money! How cool is that?

I’ve looked at a few other remote working companies such as eLance, oDesk, etc., but never really went for them. I guess the main reason was that they were not as easy nor immediate as the tasks on Mturk. Of course, Mturk pays a lot less too, but if your motivation is not 100% money (as mine wasn’t) it shouldn’t be a problem. What I also love most about Mturk was that on average, if you really concentrated and worked hard at the tasks, none of them should take more than 1 or 2 hours (even if you may have been allocated 4 to 6 hours to complete them).

Not everything is perfect though. Here are some of my gripes about Mturk.

1. US only! Why is everything so US centric? This is so annoying and to be honest discriminatory (whether direct or indirect).
2. Although the time limits are ample on Mturk tasks, sometimes if you get distracted with other things or if your computer crashes and you forgot to save, you won’t have time to complete the task and will need to return it incomplete.
3. Some people are abusing the Mturk system by posting fake tasks to do. When you click on these links to find out more about the tasks to be done, you get redirected to another site which just seems to be advertising. You can also now spot these tasks more easily with titles such as “Quick easy sign up or test webpage”. They are all fakes and the creator of these tasks are just simply trying to get hits to their advertising sites. Reporting these tasks as fakes doesn’t seem to remove or ban them from the system. It seems they will just register a new account and post a similar task again.

Finally, what would I be doing in 1, 3 or 5 years’ time? Well, as I’m only doing Mturk for a bit of fun, to earn a little pocket money as well as an opportunity to practice my English, I can’t really see any changes in the near, mid and far future. As long as Mturk works, people keep on posts interesting tasks to be completed, I will complete them to the best of my ability. So here’s to the next 10 years! Happy Mturking!”

So, what do you think?  Does this make you (as a potential buyer of services) more or less interested in hiring someone remotely?  Do you prefer this type of “no-contact” system or something more personal like oDesk?

A few years back I heard about Amazon’s new “Mechanical Turk” service. Basically you post a task, an amount you’re willing to pay to have it completed, and then people from all over the world work on it.  In my opinion it is best suited for super repetitive simple tasks that you can’ have a computer program do.  For example:

• Visit URL xxxyyy and copy the article author’s name, and date of the article
• Look at this video and tag it with 5 relevant / descriptive keywords
• Choose the best category for this product
• Flag offensive content images

It seemed like a great idea, but in a cursory view it also felt like an overly complicated process, and at the time I didn’t have thousands of simple and similar tasks that I needed cranked out.

Fast-forward to this evening (yes, it is 1:00 am right now) and just as I was about to send off a mind numbing task to my new virtual assistant I paused… then the image of the Mechanical Turk came into my mind.  Not only did I feel this project was a perfect match for what I understood about Amazon’s groupsourced system, I was excited about the opportunity to finally test it out.

While Amazon could do a better job with documentation and training videos,  the process honestly wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be.

My task:  Visit all the URLs in a spreadsheet and copy specific information from each one and fill in the blanks.  Basic data mining / data entry.

Here are the steps (simplified) that I went through:

1. Signed in with my Amazon account (cool… no other registration needed!)
2. Learned that “HIT” stands for Human Intelligence Tasks
3. Watched the “Get Started Video: Creating Your First HIT” video
4. Clicked the “Design” tab and used the “Data Extraction” template
5. Edited the template to add a few more questions and fields
6. Downloaded the “sample of the input file for this HIT template” data csv which gave me the exact fields I needed to upload to work with my design template.
7. Filled in all the data into the csv and uploaded it.
8. Deposited the pre-payment funds into my account (used my existing credit card already on file with Amazon… COOL!)
9. Published my “HIT”
10. Watched as within 25 minutes 13 results had been submitted!

I wasn’t sure how to price out the per result / assignment  price.  I saw a LOT of HITs that were listed for $0.01 – $0.03 each… CRAZY.   I decided for my first test to list at $0.05 each.

What’s so cool is the “Manage” tab where you can see the magic happen in real time (auto refreshed every 5 seconds).  This page shows cool stuff like:

• Time Elapsed:
• Average Time per Assignment:
• Estimated Completion Time:
• Estimated Completion Time: (my favorite)

Here’s a screenshot:

As you can see my “hourly rate” is about $2.90 based on how long it is taking my little turks (there are at lease 4 people working on this as I type) to complete each “assignment”.

So, the question becomes, is this hourly rate good or bad compared to having my virtual assistant do the task instead?  Well, I guess that depends on if my VA is faster or slower, or if my VA would do better quality work or worse.

I think it is too early to tell, especially since this is just one single experiment.  With that said, so far I’m pretty impressed and I think I’d be inclined to use the Amazon Mechanical Turk for future projects that I feel is something that would bore my vitual assistant or take him away from other projects he’s working on.

(btw, in the time it took me to write this, my “effective hourly rate” has dropped to $2.47 and 10 more results have been submitted)

So, have you used this tool?  What are some super huge repetitive projects you think you could outsource to a bunch of Turks?

(Morning Update) – I woke up and found this: