Julia Stubblefield, a virtual assistant, who lives in Maidenhead
Julia Stubblefield, a virtual assistant, who lives in Maidenhead © FT

No man — or woman — can serve two masters, says St Matthew. Not so, reckons Julia Stubblefield, whose two bosses phone, text and email their daily instructions from opposite ends of the country.

“It makes my job fun. It’s certainly not boring,” says Ms Stubblefield, who gave up a 15-year career as an executive personal assistant to start a family. Now her children are at school, she has returned to work, using the same administrative skills she deployed in her former positions at the BBC, Siemens and Johnson & Johnson, but as a freelance “virtual assistant”, or “VA”.

Ms Stubblefield works from her home in Maidenhead, Berkshire. One of her bosses is an investment manager in nearby London, the other a website designer in Newcastle. The tasks they outsource to her are a mix of the professional and the personal, including diary management, sending and chasing invoices, paying bills, booking holidays and even procuring a plastic turkey for a staff party.

Virtual assistants — mostly women — are increasingly being used as a way of keeping the modern workplace functioning amid a shift away from full-time support staff. Their emergence reflects a shift in female working practices as well as a general squeeze on spending.

For the first time in the UK, mothers raising children are more likely to have jobs than women without young families, according to the latest UK figures from the Office for National Statistics. Employment rates among women with childcare responsibilities stand at 69.6 per cent, compared with 67.5 per cent for women without.

For some mothers, flexible secretarial work is an attractive option, as Barnaby Lashbrooke, founder of the Time Etc agency that farms out work to Ms Stubblefield and 250 other VAs, will testify. Mr Lashbrooke says he receives thousands of applications each month from mothers keen to work from home.

“The profile of women sending us applications has changed in the last few years,” he explains. “They are now better qualified with proper commercial experience under their belt.”

He adds: “We usually meet them when their kids are off to school or nursery, and they want to . . . earn some extra money, so they re-enter the employment marketplace through us.”

The growth in the use of virtual assistants is partly demand-led. Time Etc, whose clients pay £19-£27 per hour, has been offering its services since 2007 and has grown to a size that makes it something of a bellwether for this service sector niche, complete with a US arm.

Mr Lashbrooke says that in the past month alone its client base has grown
10 per cent. He puts that down to the growing acceptance in the UK of virtual assistants by executives and entre-
preneurs who are beginning to see them as more cost-effective than employing a PA on a permanent contract, with all the attendant costs.

But some of the growth is supply-led too, by women who enjoy the work of being a PA, but not the lengthy commute or the long office hours. With email, internet and Skype at their disposal, there are few tasks that they did in the office which cannot be done remotely, on a self-employed basis and from the comfort of their home.

“It was the flexibility that attracted me,” agrees Fátima Malagueira, a VA who used to be a theatrical agent — with a couple of British soap stars among her clients — until she quit five years ago to start a family.

“I used to work 14- or 15-hour days and that’s not sustainable with a family. But my work as a virtual assistant can be fitted around my daughter and my commitment to her.”

Meet first
Finding a virtual assistant should be like hiring a team member. “It’s important to establish how both of you like to work and check that you are on the same page,” says VA Julia Stubblefield.

Give clear instructions
“The best tasks are those where everything can be explained up front and then handed over,” says Ms Stubblefield, “but clients need to be available for follow-up questions too.”

Take time to review work
A debrief can catch problems early. “It’s important not to waste valuable time doing things in a way a client doesn’t like,” says Fátima Malagueira, a virtual assistant.

That said, she does have to work during some evenings and weekends but she argues that this frees her to spend “quality time” with her daughter at a less busy moment. If she has to wait in a client’s house for a builder to arrive or a parcel to be delivered, she adds, most do not mind if her daughter comes too and settles down in front of some children’s television.

Based in Cambridge, Ms Malagueira is co-founder of Room To Breathe, a small virtual assistant agency that looks after up to 15 clients, most of whom book her time in 10-hour blocks for £280.

“At the beginning I worried that there was a risk of my career going backwards, but I now run my own business and create my own work. I’m not going backwards, I’m going forward.”

While her partner focuses more on administrative tasks, Ms Malagueira specialises in lifestyle needs. “A lot of my clients work long hours in the City and haven’t got time to sort out their home life, so they ask me to do the mundane things like sorting out their insurance, organising birthday parties and booking holidays,” she says.

The outsourcing of such tasks reflects a new sensitivity around the use of full-time administrative staff, she suggests.

“The number of executive PAs employed in the City has been cut and executives are having to share them with other people, so that makes them reluctant to ask their PA at work to buy a present for their wife. After the financial crisis, all eyes are on City workers, and that makes them nervous about using work resources for personal reasons.”

Many of Ms Malagueira’s clients are sole traders unwilling to take on a full-time personal assistant. Not all are male. “I’ve worked for a few women too, some with high-powered jobs and families who need someone to make up a short list of nannies or cleaners that they can interview.”

Choosing a career as a virtual assistant does involve some sacrifice, admits Ms Stubblefield. “I don’t get paid as much now as I did when I was a PA, though I save on travel and food.”

There is another downside to leaving the usual nine-to-five day behind. “Most of my communication is by email so I miss the banter and chat over coffee. But I don’t miss the office politics.”

Further reading: Artificial intelligence

Virtual assistants should not be confused with voice-activated smartphone helpers like Apple’s Siri. But some employers are experimenting with artificial intelligence platforms that can assist staff with lower-level administrative tasks.

Amelia

Oil services group Baker Hughes is testing a platform known as Amelia, named after aviator Amelia Earhart, which will answer queries via instant messenger from the company’s thousands of vendors about invoices and payments. The software, built by US company IPsoft, is also being used by Royal Dutch Shell to create a database to decide what staff training is required.

According to IPsoft, Amelia is able to learn by following written instructions, absorbing information in seconds while understanding context, applying logic and inferring implications. It wants to embed Amelia in humanoid robots such as SoftBank’s Pepper.

Another American software company has created a web app called Charlie, which helps executives prepare for meetings by syncing with their calendars. Charlie scans those attending each meeting, researches them, their companies and their competitors before creating a one-page cheat sheet an hour before the meeting.

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