Ep. 97: My Solutions To Prevent Mindless Work

Solutions that have worked for me to prevent mindless work. So the last six episodes that I've had have all been about mindless work from your OFS in the Philippines, what causes it, and solutions that they have proposed. Today I'm going to talk about things that I have done and seen have an effect on improving the quality of work and specifically like how I did that. So this is my personal experiences. This isn't what other people have done, which I'm sure other people have done lots of things to improve this. And I hope that I can bunch of feedback on this and get some more ideas and hopefully I can create some more episodes about this. So some of the solutions that I've tried include giving people a title, creating job security, giving responsibility, and having people like take ownership of processes and then adding quality assurance. So I've talked about these briefly in other episodes. I'm going to talk a little bit more about them. So in the Philippines, titles are important. I've had multiple people ask me, so like, what's my title here? And I'm like, well, I don't really know or care what your title is. I just want you to do the work. And then over time I realized that title matters to them. It matters to them in social situations, it matters to them for their future career. It matters to them in their current career and what their responsibilities are and what their authority is. In the US we often try and downplay titles like, oh, I work for this. What do you do there? Oh, I do finance. So you're the cfo. Yeah, I'm the cfo. That's a conversation I recently had with an acquaintance in the Philippines. It's different. So I gave someone the the title of content manager and it immediately made them look at the content that she was creating and say, oh yeah, this isn't right. Or this part of the process isn't right. We need to fix this. Just giving the title change that I recently added gave someone the title of operations manager of onlinejobs.ph. he immediately took over checking all of the software that we're doing and following up with people like, hey, what's going on with this? Hey, have you completed this? Oh, hey, you've completed this. Mark this completed in our project management system. And hey, what do you think about that? He's doing all this work now because I gave him a title. Yes. I also gave him instructions that I wanted him to do this stuff, but without the title, I just don't think it's going to happen. So the authority that comes along with a title is a big deal in the Philippines. Another thing I've done is I try and assure my people that. And this starts from the very beginning. But I'm not going to fire you if you make a mistake. I'm not going to let you go if things aren't going well for a while. I've gone for a long time with people when they weren't going well and I kind of let it go for months or even years like that when I'm still getting productive. Work is just not as productive as I want. It's not as productive as I know they can be. And yet I don't want to let them go because, for example, I recently just had someone come back from it. She's a rock star right now and this will probably continue for a long time where she's managing two different teams and pushing work forward and has all these ideas for things that we can change. And it's all really good stuff and I'm not having to do it. And yet I dealt with a couple years of slow work and problems and where things just weren't great. But I didn't want to fire her because in the Philippines that's a big deal. So along with titles, here's another one that I've tried. I've tried giving people responsibility and tried to have them take ownership over things. Now giving them titles is part of this. But so I've done things like I want part of your job to be looking at this and making sure this is well done. Like you're in charge of this process here and I need you to make sure this is well done. So maybe that's creating social media posts and there's a manager of a social media, but your job is to create the posts and I need them to be well done. And so like I've talked about, I want you to look and see does this thing make John look good or does it make the company look good or does it embarrass us? Because even if you're not the one in charge of it, if what you create embarrasses us, that means someone else has to put in the effort to fix it. And that's a problem, right? So if they don't do the, if they don't change it, then what you created embarrasses us. And if it embarrasses me personally, well, this isn't going to work and there isn't really a job anymore. Even though I really, really need you, I want you to have a job. I want you to stay employed. So this is kind of how I've had this conversation with them. I want you to take ownership over this thing that you're doing and make sure that it's done right, because it's your responsibility. So basically, I've given them authority to take charge of the final output. So the last thing that I've done, and this has worked super, super well, is recently I added a quality assurance person. And I did this in two places. First in software, where I gave this person the title of quality assurance specialist and I gave him the authority to call out mistakes that people have. So his job is to check our software. His job is to check new features or fixes before they go live and see, like, is this working as we expect it to? Is it working as a user would expect it to? Is the content on this, does it look correct when things are live on the website? He's supposed to be checking and seeing, like, how is this process? Is this process good or is this not okay? And then call out mistakes that are happening. And then he works with the programmers and works with the manager and calls out people and says, like, hey, can you work on this? Or hey, this is a problem that I think you worked on this in the first place. And that's his job. On the content side, that's another quality assurance person. His job is to look at every piece of content that we have that ever goes out and ensure that it reads well, that the process is done right, that as it's getting published, there's not another piece of content that got created that doesn't look right. His job is to make sure that it all makes sense, like it's going in the right place, that it's not just being put out there just for the sake of putting it out there. All of this is his job, and he has the authority to make changes and to call out questionable things and to fix problems. In both of these QA positions, I included a long list of areas of responsibility for them, just so that they knew specifically, like, oh, yeah, this is mine and this is mine. And this is mine, and this is mine. So all four of these things are similar and they revolve around decreasing fear and decreasing power distance index, or taking advantage of the power distance index and giving people authority to do things. And they've all been effective for me. I'm getting better work done. I'm fixing problems less often because the output's better. My ofs are telling me that they're happier. It's been really good for me. So I would encourage you to experiment for yourself, like try some of these things and see how they work. And if they work, let me know. And if they don't work, let me know too. And I want to know what you have done and to help your OFS work more productively with better quality, less concern about quantity over quality. How have you created the work culture that feels like family, so they care about their work, so they're invested? What have you done that has worked for you?