How tech lets me work anywhere in the world

How tech lets me work anywhere in the world

There is a shackling safety of working in a big corporation. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who hasn’t at one point complained about being ‘just a number’ in a company where you seem to bewilderingly bump into a new face each morning at the coffee machine.

However, with all the private healthcare, generous pension supplements and wonderful oblivion of anything tax-related, that tendency to complain seldom leads to a brave resignation into the choppy world of self-employment.

When I left my stable job in a global investment bank in London – the only place I’d ever worked – I was petrified. For more than 7 years I had been swaddled in the security of contentment, working first as a PA for busy board members, and then in HR in a business advisory role.

But life took an unexpected turn for me, and I found myself on a flight to South Africa – with no workable visa, and absolutely no clue what I could do out there.

After two weeks of marvelling at lions and over-dosing on biltong I found myself strangely missing the stability of my old working life. I was restless – to work! So I sat and thought: what was I good at (organising people), and what did I have at my fingertips (a laptop and the internet)? And that’s when I decided to become a virtual assistant.

At my job as a PA in London, despite the physical interaction holding importance, what was really important was accuracy, proactivity and reliability. I would have a very brief morning meeting each day with my manager, but other than that, unless they desperately needed a 3 pm coffee fix, I didn’t really see them.

I set up Miranda Villiers | Virtual Executive Assistant, with my first client being the CEO of a vibrant and rapidly growing start-up in London. I quickly realised I was being just as effective while sitting in the South African sunshine as I had been behind my desk in London. The nature of the beast was the same – I could book meetings, I could arrange travel, with the wonders of a Whatsapp call and ridiculously cheap Skype credit I could call anywhere in the world. I could order a Pret A Manger lunch to arrive in time for a board meeting. When important documents had been left behind, I could book a courier bike to whizz around London and save the day. Laptops left on flights, presents to be ordered from New York to New Zealand, last-minute Hamilton tickets found – all of this rang bells from my London days, and I found myself doing it from South Africa with ease.

Technology cannot substitute for in-person interaction; so any new clients I sign on, now having relocated to Jersey, I ensure I meet in person as soon as I can. Yet there is the ability to feel close enough to somebody through the immediacy of technology; the involvement it allows you into someone’s working life through their calendar and inbox access, document sharing with GDrive, instant chats such as Slack, project management with Asana and Trello Boards. Underlying all of this is the protection that is provided by secure vaults such as LastPass and 1Password – suddenly, being a remote worker doesn’t feel so distant.

Probably my favourite moment in this past year as a VA was when I first visited my client’s offices in London. He had already introduced me via email to everyone months before as ‘Miranda, my virtual PA’, and was now introducing me again in person as Miranda. I could see flickers of confusion with each new introduction. Eventually someone put me out of my misery and blurted out ‘you’re real!’. I assured him that yes, I was real. He explained that they had had a virtual PA called Carly a while ago that was a computer programme, which caused total anarchy by bullying them after each meeting with aggressive threats of ‘follow-ups’, and by not understanding weekends and scheduling 8 am Saturday calls with China.

Perhaps Carly shows that for all the wonders of technology, everyone needs the human touch once in a while. What I have done with Miranda Villiers is taken the best communication and organisational tools of the technological world and humanised them.

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