24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas explains when to schedule video calls with your online Filipino specialist. He rarely does live meetings himself, preferring asynchronous videos and chat, though his team has mixed feelings about face-to-face calls. The real question: does a meeting actually serve your business or the work itself.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at hiring OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 137. Should you have regular meetings with your OFS? So I recently got this email from Kim. She writes hi John, I love your newsletter. Quick question. 99% of my communication with my VA is via email. We used to meet on Zoom frequently and now we do not anymore. Her work is still excellent. I I'm wondering if it is a mistake to not connect with her face to face more often. I wonder what you think about this. She seems satisfied. I seem satisfied. Yet this is a nagging question. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Kim. So honestly I don't know and I'll just tell you how I do it and kind of talk through some things So I never meet with my team via video. There have been a couple times since 2005 where I've gotten on a phone call with them or maybe a Skype call with video. First of all, I don't like it. Second, usually they don't like it and that's partly why. So I don't like doing it and I don't find a need to do it. I do regularly send them videos of me, so screen capture videos with me talking or videos with the camera and my face and me talking. So there is some sort of face communication, like video communication. I will regularly get video communication back from them. Usually it's just screen recordings. They almost never put their face in it, but occasionally I'll get a face. So I asked my team about this, like what do you think about regular meetings with your boss? And I got mixed responses. So some of them don't want to do videos. Video chats they're okay with like with email and Skype and Basecamp, which is our project management system. They don't like doing face to face meetings partly because they're scared and they're embarrassed and they don't want you hearing the dogs barking or the trikes going by or the people walking by in the background or seeing their house or the whole thing. They don't love that. Others said that they're okay with regular meetings. Most of them have come from like corporate office backgrounds where they've had regular meetings. Generally they all said, yeah, I'm okay with how it is. I don't need meetings. The closest thing that we have to meetings is when we get on Campfire, which is part of Base camp. It's like a big group chat. We also have slack channels, which is a really Big chat. And usually these are smaller groups of people, like our customer service people chatting with each other, or it's our social media team chatting with each other. But in campfire and basecamp, we'll get everybody participating and not all at the same time, just because nobody's online at the same time. And not everybody participates, but everybody's seeing it. So this is, this is what works for us. Not everybody's like this. I know people that do regular meetings with people. Here's the things that I would. I would say to you. Are you having some sort of communication with them that's outside of just text? So is there some form of communication that is pretty quick, like chatting or maybe text messaging back and forth? Or are you doing some sort of video communication where you're sending screencasts where they're hearing your voice? So those are good things to do because they build relationships. And then the three questions I would ask, like, does a regular meeting serve a purpose for you and your business? Does it help you run your business? And then does it, does it help them accomplish their work? I see so many meetings in like corporate or in church or whatever that don't accomplish any of these things. And they're just scheduled meetings because we need to have a scheduled meeting and we have a scheduled meeting. So we better have a meeting, which to me is insanity. But, you know, everyone's different. I would encourage you to try it, like, see what happens. You might do a meeting and be like, oh, this sucks. I don't want to do this at all. This is not good. It's not fun. You might do it and realize, hey, like, me and my OFS really get along well and we like to talk about some things that are not work related. And this is really good for our relationship. And that's kind of some feedback that I've gotten from people. Like, hey, I do meetings regularly because it is just communication time with them where we're building a relationship and that building a relationship helps improve their work quality. So I would also be interested in hearing what you do for meetings. Do you have some ideas for me? Do you have some ideas that I could share that other people might be interested in? Send me an email. Johnnlinejobs ph.
