John Jonas caught a high-performing Filipino specialist working a second job after noticing dropped productivity and a misaddressed email. He shares three ways to spot secondary employment and why workers take them: low pay, boredom, ambition, fear. The fix is asking questions and improving their situation.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 270, how I caught my OFS working a second job. So a couple years ago, I had an OFS who was super productive. She's really smart, great at English, willing to come to me with suggestions. Just really, really great. And then over a couple month period, I noticed her productivity declined. Like, it started to decline. And I started noticing it and then it got worse and I let it go for a little while and I didn't say anything, but I wondered, I wonder if she got another job. Like, I wonder what's going on here? And then one day it happened. I got an email from her which was intended for her other employer, which was probably a nightmare for her, probably being super worried that she'd get fired from both of her jobs. She was obviously super embarrassed, very worried about me firing her. I was really grateful to have gotten it because I finally knew. Like, I knew, okay, I know she's got another job. And so we talked through it. We talked through why she got the other job. We talked through her financial situation. We talked through her role with me and the work that she was doing and how she felt about it. We talked about what we were going to do moving forward. We talked through the whole situation, and it was really good for me. Like, I found out, oh, she. She's a single mom and she has this kid and she needs to take care of herself. And her and her parents aren't helpful and things are just hard. Things are hard for her. And so we work things out. And she still works for me today, and she's still really, really great. She makes more money now. Her productivity is back up. So I found out that my OFs have other jobs three ways over the years. One, I just told you about, I get an email on accent and I think that's actually happened twice. Number two, time proof screenshots. Like, it'll show them working for someone else now. Now, I haven't used time proof in a lot of years because I don't like it and they don't like it, but it is an option. And number three, I asked them and they told me, I just asked, like, hey, are you working another job? Like, who are you working for? How many hours? And they just told me. So to me, the reason someone's getting another job is indicative of a few things. There's a combination of things going on or there's something going on. So it could Be that I'm not paying enough, I'm not keeping them busy enough, they don't like the work that they're doing. I'm not a good enough boss and they're worried about losing their job. Or I'm not a good enough boss and they are fearful of me. Like I'm a crappy boss and they're fearful that I'm just going to fire them at any point. And so they feel like they need to have another job because of that. Or they're more ambitious than I thought they were when I hired them. Like they just, they really, really want to contribute and improve their station in life or they want to make more money really, really badly. Or another option is I've created a dead end job for them. Like they're bored and they're bored with their job and it's not good and it's, they don't see a path moving forward to growth. They're not robots. These are people who want to contribute in life. They want to contribute in life, they want to contribute in your business, they want to grow in their career, they want a career. They don't just want a silly job, they want a career. And I found that if I don't provide a career for them, it's fine to provide a silly job for a little bit of time, but a career where they can grow and earn more and improve themselves and gain more skills is a whole heck of a lot better. So for me, I've always been able to work it out with them. I've always been able to keep them working for me. Sometimes their other job fizzles. Sometimes I've been able to incentivize them to work just for me. Sometimes they maintain both jobs and keep their productivity up. Although this usually doesn't last super long because it's really hard to work a lot of hours and maintain productivity in both. But in all of this, to me, asking the question is the key. Ask do you have another job? Ask why they have another job. Ask about their financial situation. They may not want to tell you, but they, they're likely to tell you. And realistically you have the ability to improve their financial situation or to improve their life situation. There's all kinds of good that comes from asking questions in this situation. See if you can improve your worker's life, thus improving your business.
