White roses on my desk communicate to me that I am on holiday and want to enjoy a spare and serene landscape when I walk into my office. I am the only intended recipient of that message.

My husband’s New Year’s resolution to have more patience with me, his beloved, indicates that I occasionally engender some anxiety in his heart and mind. This message from him to me is loud and clear and signals to me that I need to work on a few areas as well.

There’s a special tree stump on the trail I hike most frequently. People who don’t even know or see one another communicate a bit of whimsy there by creating displays of rocks, sticks and leaves on its surface. Once is was an intricate cairn in the shape of a cross: quite a lovely piece of art. Another day it was a clock face with sticks pointing to 3:00. Noting that it was only about 3:10 when I stopped there, I looked all around to see if I could find the mystery artist. Yesterday it was a humanoid face, to which I added some pine needles to simulate hair. Some who pass chuckle, I’m sure, some wipe the stump clean and create a new image with found items lying nearby. The message on that stump is “let’s enjoy our hike and leave a little humor behind,” intended for whoever passes that way.

I was a little dismayed when I read a post in one of my professional discussion groups recently, in which the service provider (we’ll just call her VA Colleague X) remarked that if she had a dime for every time a client complained about communication issues with her, she would be rich. The poster was responding to a comment by another party who had shared that she had recently lost several clients. The common threads in those broken alliances was communication and response time issues.

As a VA, you have to work extra hard at communication. You aren’t in the same room with your client so you can’t rely on visual cues to help clarify the client’s wishes. Working together over time in a real partnership can teach you more about what someone is saying vs. what you think you may be hearing. Alas, we don’t always reach that point with new clients before communication issues create insurmountable issues.

Among the topics to discuss at the outset of a new job with any client are:
1. expected turnaround after specified milestones are reached,
2. change request policies,
3. the best way to reach one another, and
4. the client’s AND the VA’s actual hours of availability.

If time and again you find that you’re just not on the same page, perhaps your communication styles are too far apart for you to be able to provide effective service.

When Colleague X added her $.02 to the aforementioned discussion, I inferred that she was being slightly flippant, and that she knew the importance of establishing and maintaining the best possible communication with all clients. Despite our best efforts, there are those situations which call for you to throw in the towel and recommend that the client find someone else. What troubled me was that her message (if I am accurate in what I thought she was saying) may actually have been misinterpreted by some less experienced VA’s in that discussion group.

We have to reserve all whimsical, vague, and sarcastically humorous communication for our personal and recreational life – there isn’t much wiggle room for non-specificity in the VA industry.