Four ways to build trust with offshore staff in the Philippines: invest in their training, set clear expectations, treat them with patience instead of blame, and take responsibility when problems happen. This approach works because Filipino workers are motivated by respectful leadership and fear of disappointing their managers.
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So here are a number of things you can do to gain their trust. The number one thing is to provide training to them. They really, really crave training so that they can grow in their career. They want you to train them. Providing training says to them, I'm willing to invest in you. I'm willing to invest in you as an employee and as a person and in your career. I trust that you're going to stick with me and so I'm going to invest in you. That to them gives them so much more trust in you as an employer that they, that you're going to give them the correct expectations, which that's the next thing I was going to talk about is setting clear expectations. I guess I'll do it a little bit right now. One of the ways that you get really great work from them is set clear expectations. If you define things well, then they know what to expect. And in the Philippines, like I've said before, they don't want to disappoint you. They don't want to let you down. And if expectations are unclear, then they don't want to try more. When trying last is just as likely to put them into the exact correct spot of what your expectations are. So if your expectations are way up here and you haven't given them this expectation, which I hadn't, I hadn't given them my expectation of impressive, then they're not willing to try to be up here. So when you're providing training, we're going back to gaining their trust, providing training. You get to set your expectations. Your expectations are this or this. Your expectations are this many. Your expectations are this good of something. So in your training you're going to say, well, hey, look at this thing that someone else did. I want your work to be like this. This is how good I want your work to be. The next thing in getting their trust is how you treat them. So being patient with people, being kind with people, not yelling at people, not blaming people, and actually more than not blaming people would be taking the blame yourself when something goes wrong. And this has been a big deal for me, I think in gaining their trust when something goes wrong, I typically approach it with, hey, I feel like I did something wrong here, or this work quality is poor. And I feel like maybe I left something out of the training. I'm wondering what's missing here for why this was poor. So the way you treat people, the way you approach treating them, especially in the Philippines, really makes a difference on their willingness to go above and beyond or to try something. New or to really try and hit the top levels of performance to be impressive.
