Ep. 15 Maybe you didn't give good instructions?

Hello and welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast. The podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing your work. My name is John Jonas and this is episode 15. Maybe you didn't give such good instructions, so let's talk about giving instructions. This last week I just bought some bamboo toilet paper and tried to do something good for the earth. And I'm just testing it, like, does this bamboo toilet paper work as good as I want? And the answer is it's not as good as like Charmin Ultra, but it's also not bad. And frankly, I don't really use toilet paper. I have bidets on all of my toilets, which I think is life changing. And so I just use it to dry. And yeah, I don't know what we were thinking when we invented toilet paper, silly, but whatever. When they showed up, when all the toilet paper showed up, I actually probably ordered like 100 rolls on accident because I bought from like three different places and just ordered a bunch of stuff. I assigned my 8 year old son to go and distribute them throughout the house and then put the extras in the closet. And that's probably the, the extent of the instructions that I gave him. And he actually did a pretty good job of distributing them throughout the house, but he didn't do it how I wanted. So he took them and stacked them up in pyramids on the backs of toilets. So each toilet has 12 rolls of toilet paper on it, I think 12, 1, 2, 3, 4 on the bottom, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 rolls of toilet paper on the back of the toilet. And, and we have like six bathrooms that he did it in and they're kind of colorful and they look kind of fun, but with the extra rolls that he got, he did put them in my closet, but he didn't really know what to do with them. So he just filled in every empty space in a closet which is in a, like on a shelves where towels go. It's completely non functional. But he did exactly what I asked him to do. I didn't realize how many extras there would be. And he just saw the space and said, oh well, I mean this is where towels go. But dad told me put them here, so I'll just put them here. He completely filled the entire closet. We have towels that are folded, waiting to go into that closet and there's no space for them because he just completely filled it. Which this kind of made me think about like ofs in the Philippines if you don't give good instructions. So I thought my Instructions to my son were pretty good. We've done this for a long time. We've done a lot of toilet paper that he puts out, but he's never had this many. So clearly, my instructions were not as good as I thought they were, because he didn't know what to do. He didn't know how to do what I wanted had done. So he did it. He did what he thought was right, given the circumstances and given what he knew. So when something doesn't go right with your ofs, consider that maybe they did what they thought was right, given the circumstance and what you have given them online. Filipino specialists aren't mind readers. And I can't tell you how many times over the years I've done this with my specialists. I'll create some instructions. I think they're complete and really good. And it's a video. Like, I just walked through this whole process, talking through it on a video. I sent it to one of my ofs, and what they do is completely different than what I imagine, than what I want them to do. And sometimes I'll go back through my instructions and I'll find, oh, man. Yeah, my instructions were just super crappy. I thought they were really good when I created it. And now that I watch it back, I'm like, I have no idea what I'm even asking you to do here. So. And I've seen this tons of times from other employers, too, where I've had employers email me and, like, yelling. I created the best instructions, and I told them exactly what to do, and I did it two different times, and this is still the crappy work that they did. And I was like, well, send me instructions. And I. And I look at their instructions. I'm like, I responded to the employer. I've done this multiple times and said, hey, look, I have no clue what you're asking me to do here with these instructions. Like, they're completely not understandable. So my point with this is your OFS in the Philippines, your online Filipino specialists are not purposefully doing things wrong. There's a reason they're doing it wrong. And usually that reason is either you haven't given them what they need, you haven't given them complete instructions. You haven't explained the details of a certain piece of it that they actually needed but were clear to you because you understand the process. So when something goes wrong, consider, hey, maybe my instructions weren't as good as I thought they were. And I went with my son back and said, hey, you did a great job, but we need to fix this because I gave you bad instructions.