Ep. 381: Evaluating the effectiveness of your OFS tasks

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists. This is episode 381, evaluating the effectiveness of the tasks your team is doing. So recently, I did an audit of the tasks that people on my team do. And I usually do this at the end of the year or at the beginning of the year. Sometimes I'll do it in the middle of the year, depending on the person. So I do this regularly to see if they're happy with their jobs. I want to make sure that the people that I work with are taken care of. I don't want them to hate their work or to feel any sort of despair in coming to work. And so with this, I ask them if they're happy with their job. I ask them what they think about the project they're working on. Is it contributing to the company? Is it good work? Is it valuable? I ask them if they like doing the work. I ask them if there are things that they think we should change. I ask them if they think there are things that we're doing that are wasting their time or wasting other people's time. I ask them all kinds of questions, and I get really interesting answers back. So maybe some of the tasks that they're doing were really important when we assign them at first, but over time, maybe they've become less important, or we've evolved other ways of doing things that kind of make that obsolete. Or maybe we thought this was going to be a really great thing for the company and it's just not producing the desired results that we thought it would. And so maybe that that project or those tasks need to be shelved, or maybe there are things that we thought we needed to do, but we actually don't. We assign the task, and someone starts doing it and keeps doing it, they don't say anything because we assign them a task, and they're gonna. They're gonna reliably do that task as long as they can. So when we reevaluate this stuff, oftentimes we'll make things go away. And often I have other things in mind to give to people, but sometimes I don't. So sometimes this means someone's going to work less. For a while, I had this situation where I assigned quality assurance to someone and took them off of something else. And the quality assurance, he's been really, really great at it, but it has also come and gone. And it means that sometimes he's definitely not working full time. And I'm okay with that because I know at some point I'm going to have another task or another project or another system that I want him to take care of. So here are some things that I specifically do in doing these evaluations. I'll ask specific questions. Things like what do you think of the work you currently do? What tasks do you think are highly valuable to the business? What tasks do you feel like are a waste of time? Which tasks feel less important to you and why? And then what do you feel like contributes the most or contributes the least to what we're doing? And all of this helps me evaluate the things that we're doing and it also helps me look at what I'm doing and how effective the work doing is. Because sometimes I get caught up in just having people do work and I don't think about the effectiveness of my work, which is probably the thing I should think about the most. Now let's bring this to you. If you have hired someone in the Philippines, you're thinking about what, what tasks are they working on? Are they effective, Are they good? Are they happy? Now let's take a step back from that and think about your own task. Is this task worth my time? Is it valuable for me to be doing this or should someone else be doing this? If you haven't hired someone in the Philippines yet, you should be looking at every single thing you do. Well, even if you have, you should be, you should be looking at all the things you do and saying, is this task a valuable use of my time or could someone else do this equally as effective or maybe slightly less effective or maybe more effective than me and I could spend my time on more valuable tasks. So realtors are a typical, classic example of this. They always talk about spending your time on the most effective tasks on the $300 an hour tasks and getting rid of the $12 an hour tasks. And there are a whole bunch of things that, that most realtors spend time on that someone in the Philippines could easily, easily do for them. And they could spend their spend more of their time on the high value task, which helped them list more homes and sell more homes, which is how they make money. But it's not just realtors, it's everybody. I have a neighbor who buys pallets of things and lists them on local classifieds or on ebay or on Pinterest or on Etsy or whatever. And he's going through these things and then listing them on ebay. When a better use of his time is to pick out the specific things and send a link to someone which is what he does. Now, he has someone in the Philippines. He sends a link and they list it on ebay and on all of the sites, they do all of the work for him and then tell him when he has an order, all he has to do is buy and sort. And even the sorting, he has added his kids to the process, so they're doing some of the sorting for him. Again, it's just an evaluation of, is this task worth my time or could someone else do this more effectively than me? So then the next step is actually designating this task. Now, I get that depending on your task, you're thinking, oh, man, that would be so hard to teach someone to do this. And it may be, it may not be. What you'll find in the Philippines is the culture lends itself really well to iterative learning of this task. You're right. What they're going to do the very first time is not going to be that great. But that also means that you don't have to go through the full process of creating full, exact, detailed instructions the first time. You can spend a little bit of time, give them a general idea and see what happens. See if maybe they surprise you and they're like, oh, I know this. I've done this before. Or if they're like, oh, wow, yeah, I really have no clue what you're talking about. And then you add more, and then you add more, and they do it and they. And you'll see, oh, they did this right, but this piece is the piece they didn't do right? And now you can emphasize that piece rather than creating all of these instructions, which I see too often, create all of these instructions and half of it's irrelevant because they already understand it or it's super obvious. You spent a bunch of time creating it and you spent too little time on the piece that they don't understand or they. Or they have a hard time with. I recently talked about this in another episode about going over my email where I taught someone to go through my email and filter the things that I don't want and even to respond to my personal email. And this was, again, an iterative process. I taught them. They started, they did it. I gave them feedback. We did a little bit more. We did a little bit more. We did a little bit more to the point where at first I didn't. I said, don't. I don't want you to respond to anything. I just want you to start learning to archive things. Archive this and this and this. And then they would do It. And then I. And I would check it, and then I'd be like, okay, you missed this one. Here's why. And here's this other type that I want you to deal with. And here's another piece. Okay, now I want you to start writing responses to some of these things, to this one and this one and this one. These specific types of emails that I get. I want you to respond to these, but just create a draft so that I can then look at it and edit and respond to it. Once we got through that and she got really, really good at it, I said, okay, now just start responding to these. I don't want you to create a draft. Just send them out. And eventually I said, hey, look, there are times when I'm not responding to email for a week, and I don't want things to go unresponded to, so I just want you to start responding. And she did, and she does a great job. And she. She marks some of them for me to look at afterwards, so I might want to add to it. But it's working really, really well. And this was one of the things that I. I never thought, oh, I wonder if this is worth my time to be doing this. I just assumed that I had to do it. And one day I thought, wait a minute, maybe I don't have to do this. And, you know, responding to my personal email is a really complicated task. Not that email is complicated, but it's her being me, and that's hard. So if I can. If I can get someone to respond to my email as if they're me. And she does. She responds as if she's me. And she does a really, really good job of it. It's not always exactly what I'd say, but it's pretty dang close. Then you can probably do that with whatever task you're thinking, oh, I don't know if I think only I can do that, I'm willing to bet someone else can do it, too. So then let me tell you where this leads and kind of where this whole concept came from. I was sending these. I was sending these evaluation messages with people on my team, and at the same time, I was also getting some. I had gotten some messages from people saying, oh, I'm back to hire my third person. I'm back to H person. I'm hiring my second person. And I started recognizing, you know, this is why these people are back hiring another person, because they're giving things out. They're getting things off their plate. They're hiring people to do other things for them. They're hiring an SEO person and they're hiring someone to do data entry and then they're hiring a graphic designer and they're just adding team member after team member doing different things. Or maybe they're just customer support and then customer support and customer support, it doesn't really matter. The point is they're doing exactly what I said. They're giving something to someone, they're teaching it, they're giving feedback, they're working through the process. And then once that thing is gone off your plate, it never comes back to you. And now you realize, oh, wow, I have all these other things that I let me see if I could do this. And you hire someone else and they're back hiring, like I said, their sixth person or their third person or they already have their first and they're just so excited to hire another because they've realized, wow, this is changed my business completely. So if you're ready, if you're finally ready to hire someone, take the leap. Now, look, let me give you a couple pieces of advice. Number one, start@ofsguide.com it will answer the top nine questions that I get. I get asked these things every single day and I just send people to ofsguide and they usually don't even come back to me again. Number two, once you're done with OFSguide, which is like a four minute read, 1vaoa.com will walk you through the process of hiring someone. Great. It's super simple. It's designed to be quick, easy, effective. I know the process works. I get emails from people every single day saying, I followed your process and it worked and it was amazing. 1vaoa.com and if you're, if you're just ready, you know what you're doing. It's super easy to find. Basically any skill you want at onlinejobs phone.