24 Nov 2025 · 4 min
John Jonas explains how to check if your Filipino virtual assistant actually understands your instructions. Ask them to summarize the task or share their thoughts instead of just asking if they get it. It takes days or weeks longer at first, but cuts errors and uncovers better ways to do the work.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 276, making sure your OFS understands your instructions. So giving feedback and training is just part of having people in the Philippines, and it's part of having people working for you. You are the CEO. You have to guide and direct. So when I. Let me just talk about giving feedback and instructions today. So when I give my OFS team instructions on basecamp or an email or send them video instructions, I don't often ask them whether they understood what I said they're trying to understand. What I ask them instead is, what do you think about this? Or I ask, how can we improve this process? So I send them something and I say, what do you think? And how can we improve this? And the reason I ask this is because I don't just want to make sure that they understand. I want to make sure that we understand the same thing. Because I found that over the years when I give instructions, often people don't understand the same thing that I understand. And part of that is that when I give instructions, I have all these assumptions in my head about what's going on, and other people don't have that understanding. And I'm not explaining those understandings, and I'm making assumptions about what they know. And I didn't know that I was doing that. And it took me a lot of years to recognize it. And I want to understand if they know enough to do the job correctly rather than just, do they understand? Because like I talked about in the last episode, do you understand? And them saying yes when they don't actually understand what I wanted or what the way that I understand it leads to them disappearing. And that's the worst case. I don't want to lead to them disappearing. So when I ask them for their thoughts on a process, I know that this is going to delay getting this thing done. It's going to make them send me something back and me send them something back, which is going to take another day. And if it's a complicated thing, it might take days or weeks before we get this thing started, but at least then I know we've talked through it. They understand, I understand we have a better. We understand the whole situation better. And actually, when I get their thoughts back from them on what I'm asking them to do, often will improve the process. I'll get other insights from them and then we can make changes and tweaks and they'll have ideas and like Oh, I think we should. And I'm like, well, I don't agree with that, but that does bring up another point that we could also it leads to a really good discussion a lot of the time. So then one last thing. Another way that I've seen other people do this is asking the your OFS to summarize the instructions that you gave them to make sure that they understood. Now, this doesn't ask them for their thoughts, but you could also ask them for their thoughts. So can you please summarize this task and then tell me how you think we can improve it or tell me your thoughts on it or is this going to be effective for us or something to get them thinking and responding to you. Last thing, totally unrelated. So today I had emails from people asking me for four different kinds of people. They said, do you have someone that can or someone that knows Canva? Yes. Procurement was one. Like do you have someone with experience in procurement? Yes. WordPress? Yes. Marketing and social media? Yes. Those four things came in today. Yes, yes, yes and yes, we have. There are 2 million profiles. If something. If there's a skill that's done online or on a computer, on a phone. Yes, you can find it on onlinejobs, physical.
