John Jonas explains why offshore staff sometimes work mindlessly: fear, cultural power dynamics, prioritizing speed over quality, laziness, and weak company culture. He shares a story about a poorly edited video that got published, then outlines five root causes and plans eight episodes to solve each one.
Chapters
Why your OFS sometimes work mindlessly. So this morning I asked my son to my 8 year old to clean up his playmas and this is what clean up your play mess looks like to an 8 year old boy. I went and talked to him about it like, hey, what happened here? Like, I asked you to clean this up and he said, I did clean it up, dad, I'm still playing with those. So he wasn't careless or mindless about it. He thought about it like, I cleaned up my stuff, but I'm still playing with these ones so I'm not cleaning them up. Which was really cool that at least he thought he thought through it. So a while back I sent a newsletter about how my OFS had published a video that was horribly edited. And I've talked about this multiple times since. The video started mid sentence. It didn't have any context around it. It got published by someone else. It was a bad edit. Someone else saw the video and still thought they'd publish it. It wasn't well thought through by either person. And I wanted to know like, why, why did this get published? What happened here? Because this isn't the first time something like this has happened, but what causes this? So I sent a newsletter about it and I got a bunch of responses and my friend Dennis Yu responded to me and what he said was really interesting. So he said the mindless activity is one of the biggest challenges we have with vas. He told me how one of his, One of his VAs is handling social media for his company and for a client. And he was posting the client immigration law Instagram posts on the on his agency's social media. And Dennis was like, how does this make any sense at all? Like, what would the agency audience be interested at all in an immigration law post? This just doesn't make any sense. Why would this get posted here? Right? So I'm sure that Dennis and I are not the only two that have had things like this happen. And so I went to my team about it. I made a big long post in our basecamp saying, why does mindless work happen? And here are some thoughts of mine. But I really want to know why you guys think this happens. And I gave them the out of being like, you can respond here if you want or you can send me me an email and if you want, you can send me an anonymous email. Here are some ways to anonymize your email so that I don't know who this is from. I got probably 10 responses from my team and all of them were really long and really well thought out. It was really cool. So here's what I found in summary. Like, of those 10 responses, I had like five main things that kept repeating themselves. Here they are. Number one, fear is a large driver of Filipino behavior. Number two, the power distance index of the Philippines is strongly at play. And number three, often for VA's quantity gets emphasized over quality. And so I'm going to talk about that. And it's because quantity is visible. Number four, sometimes I just get lazy, like I just want to complete my tasks. And then number five, there's a lack of company culture. So Filipinos are very family oriented and if they feel disconnected in the business, it's like they just don't care. So this is just a summary. Over the next, I think eight episodes, I'm going to talk about why work gets done mindlessly and how to solve it. Like what are their solutions? What are my solutions that have worked? I'm going to give you, I'm going to go into detail on each of these five things. The fear, the power distance index, quantity over quality, laziness and family culture. So I'm going to go over each of these things one by one in detail and I'm going to give you a lot of recommendations for how to solve these things and how to prevent the mindless work. Work. You already know one of the things that I've done because I've talked about it in multiple previous episodes, which is having quality assurance people and giving them authority to be a quality assurance person. It has been really, really helpful. So watch for this in the next, in the coming episodes, how to prevent or what causes mindless work and how to prevent it.
