John Jonas gives practical, experience-based advice on giving bonuses and gifts to virtual workers in the Philippines. Recommended approaches include asking about a wedding registry, sending Lazada or Shopee gift cards, or simply giving cash (example: $150 for a teammate's wedding); he cautions that mailed packages can be unreliable and that structured, metric-based incentive programs tend not to work well.
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How to give bonuses and gifts to your virtual worker in the Philippines. Hey, my name is John Jonas and today I'm talking about giving bonuses and gifts. So last week I had someone email me and say, hey, I want to send a gift to my VA who's getting married. How do I do that? What's the best way? So there's a couple options. Number one, a lot of Filipinos, when they're getting married, they've embraced the registry. So they'll have an online registry. And if you ask them, you can say, hey, you know, like, what, where are you registered? And they'll send you to a couple different places, maybe Amazon, maybe another couple websites. So another option is to use one of these other websites like Lazada or Shopee. So L A Z a D a dot com Lazada or Shopee S H O P E E are both websites in the Philippines where they can buy so many things. And a gift card to one of those places is really, really awesome. Amazon in the Philippines isn't as big as like Lazada is. So that's a good way to give a bonus. So here's another way to give a bonus. One of our workers got married last week actually, and we sent him $150 and said, hey, know, congratulations, we're so happy to have you. Thank you. Go enjoy your honeymoon. Here's time off. Here's some money. Come back to work when you're ready. And that's a really good way to give a bonus to someone. Say, hey, we love you and here's some money. We just sent them cash and that was something that one of our teammates said, like, hey, cash is always really helpful. So to give bonuses to. To people in the Philippines, cash is a good option. Gift cards is a good option. Lazada or Shopee, shipping stuff there, not a super great option. It's really difficult. The mail is not reliable. Packages get stolen. Just not a great option. So, and then if you have doubts, ask your worker, ask your teammate, like, maybe, maybe they'll have some other ideas of how to send a bonus to someone on your team. So another thought about giving bonuses is I will. Often when someone does really good work, I'll just send them money at the end of the month and say, hey, you were amazing this month. Thank you so much. Here's $50 extra. One of the things I haven't seen work super well is a structured incentive program. I've had quite a few people ask me about, like setting up. I want to give them these bonuses if they hit these specific metrics and that often will not work in the Philippines. So part of the reason it won't work is because as soon as you give them these specific metrics, then they're going to worry, oh, I'm not going to hit those goals and then I'm going to lose my job and you're going to be disappointed in me so that I can't really try all these other things that I want to try because then if they don't work, then it's my fault. And then, and then you really create a situation where like, they're really standoffish and they're not trying to do they're not working the best way that you want. So what I've seen is bonuses unannounced work much better than, like, setting up goals and a commission structure. My name is John and I created onlinejobs Ph, where you can hire amazingly talented people in the Philippines. I like to call them ofss online Filipino specialists, where they're good at generating leads, they're good at doing SEO, they're good at social media marketing and graphic design and programming, and they're really talented. You can hire a talented accountant or a bookkeeper or someone to edit your videos or whatever it is. You can hire an OFS to do that as long as it's online or on the computer or on the phone. Last week I had someone tell me that they hired some auditors to help them, junior auditors. And within a year they had become like senior auditing analysts. Like, they were super, super talented. You can hire just about anything in the Philippines at onlinejobs Ph.
