Create A Rock Star VA - Part 2 - Course Video 12 - John Jonas

So my fourth pillar is managing expectations. And if you expect someone to be a really great worker, you need to be a really great boss. If you're not a good boss and if you just don't care, you don't, you ignore them. They're gonna become crappy workers, and obviously you don't want that. So I think often some people think, oh, Filipino workers can do anything. They can do anything I want. And the reality is that, you know, your expectations might be different than their skills or than their ability to enjoy something. And so ask them what they can do. Ask them, do you think you could do this? Or is this something you might enjoy? Rather than saying, oh, I think they can do everything. So I'm just going to give this to them. Sometimes they can do it, sometimes they can't. And depending on how you've treated them up to that point, they'll tell you what they like and what they don't. My fifth pillar in management with Filipinos is training. And I've talked about this over and over again. It's so important, it's hard to overstate it. When they hear your voice, they start to trust you. They start to know that you're willing to provide them training, which means they're willing to do new things, because if they mess it up, you're willing to provide them training. It means that if they don't understand something, they know that you'll come back and explain it again to them. Training goes does so many things to help them want to be an amazing employee and want to stick with you long term. It solves some of the cultural feelings of them feeling unworthy and feeling not good enough, where they'll start to come out of that shell because you're providing them training. So training over and over again, videos, audios, books, whatever you have, it will always help them improve as a worker, more than just improving their skills. Another thing that training does, it helps them understand your business. Where you know a contract worker or maybe even someone in the US you don't want them to understand your business, or maybe someone in India, you don't want them to fully understand your business because they're going to steal it. Where in the Philippines, they don't want to steal your business so you can teach them things that you wouldn't teach someone else. The more you teach that person, the more they start to synthesize information and the easier it becomes for them to do other things down the road. So, for example, I was one time creating some training on writing reviews. And as I created those trainings. I had to create multiple trainings over and over and over again. And at the end of it, we got it right. And it was permanently, we got it right. And then as we went on from writing reviews to doing SEO, so much of that knowledge carried over into doing SEO. And as we did articles and started publishing guest blog posts or started doing Facebook, that knowledge then carried over into multiple different areas. So that training that I had given them didn't just affect their ability to do what I was training them on. It affected their ability to do everything from that point forward, which made my life so much easier. The more you train, the more you'll see that things get easier as you move forward. So along with the training comes feedback. Filipino workers thrive on feedback and especially positive feedback. One of my workers one time told me, I asked her, you know, what do I do well, what do I do poorly? She said, the best thing you do is your feedback is always phrased positively. The worst thing you do is you don't give enough feedback that was. They thrive on it. The more feedback you can give, the better off you're going to be. So my sixth pillar with this is be the expert. Now, this doesn't have to be all the time. You don't always have to be the expert, but at least once or twice or three times, it's really important that you show that Filipino that they can trust you, that they can trust that they can come to you with problems or that you know what you're talking about in your business. So in being the expert, I give them training and I work with them through a project, which is very different than what most people do when where I give them training and they hear my voice, which starts to build their trust, and they come to me with problems and I give them answers. So where most people will hire someone to do something they don't know how to do, so when that person has a problem, they come to you and you say, I don't know, I don't know. And now that person trusts you even less because they know that they can't come to you with problems and you can't give them answers. So the next time they have a problem, they're just stuck, and now their job gets harder. So there's a whole bunch of things that come with being the expert that improve your situation. Now, you don't always have to be the expert, but this is why I recommend in the beginning that you hire someone to do something you know how to do so that they know that their Job. There's always support for them in their job. So my seventh pillar is communication. You know, the daily email that they are supposed to send you is super important for your sanity. The daily response from you to them is super important for their sanity. If you go a couple days without responding to their daily email, even though you may not have something to say to them, they start to worry, oh my gosh, is he mad at me? Oh, is he gonna let me go? Is his business failing and I'm gonna be out of a job? The response back to them is really important to them. There's lots of ways to do this. You can. I have a friend that told me his people are not allowed to email him. They're only allowed to communicate with him through the project manager system. He wants everything in their project management system. I have other people that have a daily Skype phone call with their, with their workers. You know, for me, I do it through email. Whatever you're going to do that daily communication is really important in this communication. Asking questions is also really helpful. So like, do you know how to do this thing or how do you feel about doing this work? Or how long do you think this is going to take? Give me an estimate before you even start it. And I know that's hard. Any questions you can ask them where they're going to give you input into how things are going will go, will go a really long ways towards, towards opening communication where they're willing to talk to you. So my last pillar of managing Filipinos is really just some tips. And these come from the Filipino workers themselves. These come from some of my workers and from some others who I've talked to over the years. So first, don't create a dead end job. Here's what one of them said to me. There are bosses that give very easy tasks, giving the employee no room to improve. They give tasks like posting hundreds of tweets on Twitter, doing hundreds of profile linking. You know, nobody wants to do that. It's okay to have them do that, but if that's the only thing they're doing, it's kind of a dead end for that person and they're not motivated to do well. The next thing is don't be harsh. You know, Filipinos are very sensitive to harshness. What they told me was my friend's boss sometimes are very authoritative, fault finder over judgmental. It creates a gap between employee and employer. It makes them work because of fear of losing their job. When someone's working because of fear of losing their job, you Know, the quality of work declines. Next thing, don't have impossible standards. This is a really important one that I've seen lots and lots of times. It's kind of a recurring theme among employers. Hiring Filipinos. This person said. A friend of mine was working with this guy who hired a manager. All of them were required to waive on Skype for roll call. If you don't wave or say hi, you're fired. He got fired. Obviously they were made to black hat since the guy had no SEO background. Hired managers who had no background too. When they gave their opinions or discouraged certain strategies, he said they were being difficult. The guy made assumptions and said they were not allowed to be absent even with storms, sickness, or family emergencies. He was a monster. My friend lost weight until he was fired. You know, Filipinos are sensitive generally, and the nicer you can be to them and the more understanding of their life, the more likely you are to succeed with this. And you know, that's a management principle anywhere in the world. But it's especially important in the Philippines when you're paying your workers their livelihood depends on that paycheck. Pay them on time. It's really important they get it on time. If they're getting it five days later, 10 days late, or you're delaying because it's the weekend or whatever, it's a big problem for them where they may be out of money and like, can't eat. So paying them on time is a really big deal. Last thing, and this is important, and it sounds weird. Never talk about your workers. Don't tell names. Don't tell your friend. Oh, I had this really great guy. His name is Ringo, and he's. He does this and this and this. Your friend will go and try and find Ringo on onlinejobs ph and try and hire him. I've had this happen to me. I friended all my workers on Facebook, and immediately after I friended them, they started getting job offers from other employers. I had to unfriend all my workers. When you have someone who's really great, don't tell their name to anybody. Don't talk about it. It's great to have them, but I'm just saying it's so easy for someone to make a job offer to try and recruit that person away from you. So those are my eight pillars of management. And if you'll follow these pillars, you'll have probably a four times better chance of succeeding with your workers than if you ignore these things. I've seen this over and over again. We've probably helped 20,000 employers hire Filipinos over the years. Generally more success than failure. But these things that I've talked about will really help you in succeeding with this and creating long term financial success with outsourcing.