24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas shares a story about his OFS team linking an ID-proof explanation to the wrong page on OnlineJobs.ph. The fix took one email, but the lesson is bigger: remote teams have different perspectives and will make mistakes. Correct them calmly, give positive feedback, and move on.
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 20, what to Do when youn OFS Team Disappoints you. So yesterday I talked about the state mountain bike championship race that we were at, and the race is a big deal for us. I'm going to talk about it a couple times because we really spend all year preparing for it. I mean, my girls start riding their bikes January 1st, and it is cold outside. We're in Utah. We're at about 5,000ft of elevation. They ride their bikes every day and they work their butts off. And so yesterday I told you about my younger daughter who placed fourth in the freshman girls race. My older daughter, who's a junior in high school, also took fourth place, but in the varsity girls race, which is a different story. It's like a full different accomplishment. The varsity girls race is so unbelievably competitive, yet even taking fourth place out of the top 100 girls in the state who qualified. So the winner of her race is the current national champion in her age group. My daughter's disappointed because she thought she could win the race. She had hoped to win the race. All the girls who beat her, the 1, 2, and 3, she has beaten them before, and she's beaten them this year. She didn't have a great race, and she's pretty disappointed. And that happened to me today. So today I got something back from my team that I was pretty disappointed in. Here's what happened. I let a couple of my ofs take the lead on adding some clarity to ID proof on onlinejobs. Ph, if you don't know what ID proof is, it's a. It's a system that we developed to figure out are they who they say they are. It doesn't. It doesn't show, like, how talented they are. It just shows, can I trust that this person is who they say they are? And we needed an update to it. And so I let them do some. Do the work. And I had kind of joined the conversation. There was a lot of conversation about it. And then they pushed it live. And I checked it and I was like, what, man, you got? I was disappointed. So don't get me wrong, most of what they did was great. I mean, they actually did a really good job. But the piece that explains ID proof links to a page that's intended for workers, yet it's on a page that's clearly intended for employers and they just linked it to the wrong page. And I needed more thought put into this. And I was like, oh man, this is so, this is so obvious. Why would you link it to this page? And then the more I thought about it, the more I kind of realized that they did what they thought was right here from their perspective, because their perspective is different than mine. Your OFS perspective is different than yours. They did a really good job on the rest of the project. It was just that one link that wasn't right. It was super easy for me to correct. I just, I sent an email. I just hoped that the whole thing would be correct without me being involved in it at all. It didn't happen. So I sent an email saying, hey guys, this is an employer focused page. It needs to link to an employer focused page. They fixed it super easy. Just be aware that you're gonna have times where your team and they're trying their best and they still make a mistake. You're gonna need to correct that mistake. Recognize that they're trying their best and their perspective is just different than yours. And that's my point with this whole thing is their perspective is different than yours, their life experience is different than yours, their experience with your business is different than yours. They're going to make mistakes that you wouldn't make that things that seem obvious to you that weren't for them. And maybe your instructions weren't great, maybe they didn't pay enough attention, maybe they didn't think through it enough. Maybe their experience just is just different. So expect this to happen and when it does, you're going to be disappointed. Just ask them to correct it, give positive feedback and move on.
