Ep. 345: Creating a great online work culture

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 345, creating a great Online Work Culture. So recently I had a podcast episode about an OFS running out of things to do and what do you do when that happens? And I got a response from EJ who said we never run out of work. We have hundreds of clients but not enough OFS. As budget becomes available, I hire more OFS. I currently have 17, but we honestly need about 30. We have a huge backlog of work. When we finally get all the backlog work caught up, things will loosen up a great deal as the tasks become monthly tasks rather than all at once. When that happens, I have other business models I want to initiate and that will not only give them more work, but I'll also be able to give them raises. So EJ pretty much proves my point of what I talked about in that episode that you don't actually know how much work you have to do until you hire someone to start doing work and you commit to hiring that person full time and you need to take up their time and when they run out of work, you start to work on your business instead of in your business. You start to discover wow, there's a lot of stuff that we could should be doing. And when you hire an OFS to do the work for you, well, you get more time. You do more high value work which brings in more clients or more customers. More clients mean more money and more work. It's a vicious cycle that just. Well, it's not really vicious, it just grows your business. So EJ then shared with me something about how he interacts with his team. He has created a fun place to work which yeah, okay, it makes sense that his team is growing, they have so many clients and that he needs to hire more people. They are only interacting online, but it's something they all look forward to. So here's what he says. Completely off topic. Here's something funny. I typically meet with my team around 8am or 9am to go over things and give them updates just before the shift ends at 10am my time. A few months back my OFS organized a company retreat that I donated to. This was something they initiated and planned. Blew me away. Anyway, during the weekend long events they did some karaoke. Turns out a few of them were actually pretty good singers. It got back to me and after one Friday meeting I asked one of them to sing for us. Of course you know how shy they are. So I said, if you sing for us, I'll give everybody everyone off on Monday, a three day weekend. So she asked if she could turn off our camera, to which I said of course. So she turned off her camera and she sang beautifully. It was awesome. So I stuck to my word and gave everyone. The following Monday off, the funniest thing happened. It's now turned into an every week thing. One of them steps up and wants to sing. Even three got up together and sang as a group. They're actually practicing on their time off. They have me laughing so hard. So now, so far they have been given every Monday off since the first time. Some great singing and some not so great, but it's a blast every time. My team is so awesome. When you start hiring people in the Philippines, you never think you're going to say my team is so awesome or that you're going to end up saying singing karaoke with them or you're gonna have such great love for these people that are on the other side of the world. So many people start this and they're like, oh, I just need a va. And you think, oh, it's just a robot on the other side of the world. It's not like I don't really care who it is, just give me someone. And then you end up loving this person and you end up spending time with them and they end up being your friend and it's really amazing. And like EJ says, my team is so awesome and my team is so awesome. And I hear that every single day from other employers. My team is so awesome. If you haven't hired someone yet, now's a really great time to started. If you have someone, maybe now's a good time to hire a second person to start building a team so you can continue to grow your business. EJ's problem of we have too many clients, we need to hire more people is a really good problem to have.