John Jonas argues against time-tracking software for virtual assistants and says to judge them by task completion and quality instead. He runs his own team on salary with no tracking, and recommends a trial period to assess whether a VA actually delivers.
Chapters
How do you know if a virtual assistant is actually doing their work? So one of the questions I get all the time is like, how do I know if they're actually putting in the hours that I hired them for? I hired them for 20 hours a week. How do I know if they're actually putting in 20 hours instead of 15 hours? So I understand this question. I understand why you're concerned about it if you're hiring someone in the US at $20 an hour or $50 an hour. But when you've hired someone at $3.50 an hour or $4 an hour, whether they work 15 hours or 20 hours isn't super relevant anymore. What matters is did the work get done and did it get done well enough or did it not get done? And that's really the question you need to be asking. So I had a conversation yesterday with someone who said, oh, I use HubSpot to track their time and then to pay them, but it causes all kinds of problems for me and my customers have all kinds of issues with it and we don't like using the software. And I said, well, at onlinejobs we offer time proof. It's a time tracking software. Like, it'll take screenshots of their time and it'll track their working time and it'll report it to you. So you can see like, oh, were they actually working based on the screenshots and how much time did they spend? So I don't recommend you use it. We offer it, it's free, you can use it anytime you want. But I don't use it and I don't recommend you use it. And here's why. So imagine in the US having someone who works downstairs from you who you don't see them every day, you don't see them all day long, you rarely see them. Are you going to force them to have time tracking on their computer? Because otherwise, who knows, Maybe they're not showing up on time or maybe they're leaving early or late or, you know, like, you don't really know what's going on. And it's kind of the same principle in the Philippines. Are they getting their work done or are they not? And in the Philippines, it's a little bit worse than that where they really don't like being tracked, they don't like being spied on. It creates a cultural problem for them where they're very concerned about doing good work and not letting you down. They want to make you happy. As soon as you add this element of tracking to it, all Of a sudden, they're concerned that you're going to be disappointed in them, that you might see something in their work that wasn't directly related to your work. Like they might have gone to a website to do some for you, and you might see that in their thing. And then they're concerned that you're going to be upset with them and they're going to be disappointed. So then they're going to be super careful and paranoid. And what it really leads to is they'll just track less time because they're concerned about it. And then you'll just see, oh, they're not really working enough. The whole situation is not good. Instead, here's what I recommend. When you hire someone, you're going to do a trial, a trial period with them where you're going to gauge like, is this productive for me? Is it even working at all? If it's not working, like, fine, you don't need a time tracker to know that it just didn't work. If it does work now, you have a pretty good gauge of productivity. You'll have a good gauge going forward. You'll always know, like, oh, man, stuff's getting done or stuff's not getting done and it's not getting done on time and it's not being efficient. And you can always say something like, hey, what's going on here? Why isn't this getting done? Why is this taking so long? Or why isn't this getting done on time? Or why are you. Aren't you doing as many of these as you used to? What's the problem? If that's the approach you'll take with, are they working their full hours or not? You'll have a much better experience in hiring workers in the Philippines. And this is the approach that I take. I have 36 people that work for me full time in the Philippines, and none of them get tracked. None of their hours get tracked. We pay them a salary and they're super happy with it. And I'm super happy with it because I get really great work done. So how do you know if someone's actually working the full hours that you said? Well, you gauge it based on productivity, not based on minutes tracked using a tracking software. So my book the Outsourcing Lever is available for free, where I will walk you through the whole process so you'll know all about, like, how do I track people's times? Or how do I know if they're working the full time? Or how do I pay people? Or how do I pay. Do I pay people hourly or do I pay them a salary or what do I do? It's all covered here in the outsourcing lever. Go get it. Outsourcinglever.com it's free. I bought a thousand copies of it. If you'll just pay shipping to get it to you. I have paid. I've covered the cost of the book. I think it's $7 for shipping. You can become an expert at this whole thing super quickly and you'll know all about hiring virtual assistants in the Philippines. Again. OutsourcingLever.com Go get the book and hire someone and see if this works for. Sam.
