Ep. 142: Pay Your Newly Hired OFS Weekly

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 142 pay your OFS weekly at first. Okay, so before I get into that, let me talk for a second about this bike trip that we just got back from in Europe was real. I mean, it was life changing. Not so much for me, although yes it was for me. It was life changing for my kids. My 15 year old daughter had a really, really healing trip where she has struggled with food, she struggled with eating, she struggled with depression. Partway through the trip, things kind of started changing for her and I don't know why, but she started eating really well, she started sleeping well, and she's just doing really, really well. Even being home now, she's doing really well. My two youngest kids grew up. I mean they're 8 and 10. And on this trip they grew up. And I don't have answers for why. I just have like some of the things that we experienced as we did this. I mean, we flew into Paris and we started riding our bikes from there. We started riding east and we rode into Germany and turned south and went to Switzerland and east into Austria and then back north up to like Munich and then into Austria again. And we ended up in Salzburg, Austria, which is kind of the setting, the backdrop setting for the musical the Sound of Music, which I didn't grow up watching the Sound of Music, but my wife did. And I've seen it a number of times since we've been married. And as man as we climbed these mountains in Austria, I just couldn't help but seeing in my mind over and over again the hills are alive with the Sound of Music, because they really are. And it's a different place than where I'm from, where most of the hills. I mean, we have these really big mountains right here, but they're kind of brown. And most of the year summers here are hot and dry and springs typically aren't that long or stuff doesn't start to bloom until late and, and wow. It's such a different culture. Different culture, different place, different land, different temperature, different humidity. The whole thing was different and it was so, so cool. And that's probably partly what helped my kids to grow and change and learn and really, really good. Okay, so now that I've said that this is a different. There's a different culture in the Philippines too. And when you hire someone in the Philippines, they're worried that you are, you're going to scam them. That's a big concern from them. And so before they're willing to go above and beyond or do really great work, you have to gain their trust. And one of the ways you gain their trust is by paying them weekly for the first couple months. And this is one of the very, this is one of the first things I tell everybody who hires someone in the Philippines. Pay the person you just hired weekly until they trust you. So they're very scared about doing a bunch of work and not getting paid for that work. They've been taken advantage of before. So pay them weekly. However, when you do that, don't pay ahead of time. So they start on Monday, pay them next Monday after they've worked for a week, and then you pay them for that week that they just worked. Yeah, do not pay, do not prepay for work. That's a problem. This will also help protect you if you'll pay them weekly for the first couple months where if things aren't working out like you've paid them, you paid them for a week and the second week you pay them again. And the third week, you know, like, oh, this isn't going to work out. So you're only out like, you know, if you decide to fire them there, you can say, hey, I'm going to pay you for this extra week. And then I'm going to. This isn't working out for me. But you feel good about paying them for it. It's not that much more because you're only paying for a week and they feel good about getting paid. They tried the job, it didn't work out right. So that it'll protect you from that. Where they won't feel cheated, they won't feel scammed. It protects them because they really just want to work. But this fear that I've talked about of them not trusting you, them getting scammed, it. It's really legitimate. They have this, it's a strong thing. So when you add to that the fact that they're not really comfortable talking about money at all, and especially with a foreign boss, them asking you for their salary is a really, really hard thing for them. And so when you pay them weekly and you remember it for the first couple months, it goes a long ways towards them feeling comfortable with you after that. You can pay bi weekly or monthly, whatever you do. We pay a lot of our people monthly. We pay a few of our people bi weekly. So we have both of them. The monthly happens on the 1st and the bi weeklies or I guess it's not. It's bi monthly. Those happen on the 1st and the 15th. Doing this will help you gain their trust in you. It'll help them become a better worker. They'll be more willing to put in effort. They recognize that you recognize their cultural limitations, that you're trying to be a good employer. They'll recognize these things, and it'll make things much easier for you.