John Jonas explains why recorded video training is the most valuable investment when hiring Filipino virtual workers. He recommends tools like Jing, Google Hangouts, and ScreenSteps, and warns against dumping generic info-products on workers without filtering out irrelevant sections first.
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Okay, so the last thing I want to talk about in this video is training. This is the number one best use of your time. Certainly in the beginning, but probably over the first year of having someone work with you is teaching this person how to work with you. Giving them training so that they know what to do in their job, giving them training so that they understand you. And I'll talk about some of this management philosophy in the next video. But the more training you give, the more successful you're going to be. The more video training you give, the more successful you're going to be. Giving Filipinos training is the best way to, to build their trust in you, to make sure that they understand what you're saying. It really goes a long way to fill in multiple gaps in this. You know, in a normal job where you were hiring someone locally, you would talk to them face to face and you would walk to their office a couple times a day where here you can't do that. And so video kind of helps fill in those gaps so much. So here are some tools that I have come up with and used that'll help you do this. And different people work differently. So here I'm going to give you multiple things that you can use. So number one, Jing or Snag it. I use Jing and Snagit every single day. I use it multiple times a day. I really highly recommend you download and install either Jing or Snagit and start using them. You can also use webinars to teach them where they get on a webinar where you're not seeing them, but they're seeing you. You can use a Google Hangout. Google Hangouts are really good. They might turn their video off because it might be too much bandwidth for them. Bandwidth in the Philippines isn't great, but you might see them and have the video. It'll be a really good interaction between the two of you. Where almost like a job interview, but not quite the same as a live thing where you're sitting in the same room. But it'll go a long ways toward them trusting you and being willing to work hard for you. Skype is another option that you can, that you can do with this. Although I found that Filipinos right now prefer a Google Hangout to Skype. In terms of text based training, there are a couple different things. We use Google Docs quite a bit. There's just normal email, which we do a lot, or a project management system where we're able to add email or add text and images into it. That helps. Another one is Another one is Screen Steps. It's a program that allows you to make a PDF file based on you taking screenshots of things you're doing and annotating them and screenshots. And then it's easy to edit them later so you can create a training document that will last for a long time and it's easy to edit. Whereas a video, once you, once you record it and then things change, it's really hard to go back and edit it. You have to kind of have to go back and rerecord the whole thing. I do both. We do all of these things. They all help in helping train people. I can't overemphasize the need for video in this. It doesn't have to be face video, but using video where you record yourself talking is really important. Okay, two more things about training. One of the things that people often want to do is give their workers someone else's training programs. And here's the problem with this. I've done this and it has problems. So every info product out there, whether it's DVDs or a seminar or, or an ebook, whatever it is, every one of them is designed for the CEO of the business to implement. They're never designed to be given to a worker and say, hey, here's your job. Implement this. And here's the CEO's input. Everything is designed as if the CEO is reading it and they're going to implement it, which is totally the wrong way to do things. Because what CEO has time to implement these things in the info product? You? I don't. And so here's what I have found. If you're going to give someone else a training product, here's what you have to do. I'll tell you my experience. I bought a product once, it was like a 40 page ebook. I bought it, I downloaded it. In the past, it would have just sat on my hard drive because I would have gotten distracted by an email and I don't have time and I'm too busy. So this time I knew that I was going to have one of my workers in the Philippines implement it. So I read it and as I read it, I took notes and I noted that, oh, this isn't relevant to us, but this is really important. So when I sent it to my guy in the Philippines, said, I want you to implement this. This book is really great. It's a really great tactic. However, I want you to pay specific attention to these chapters and these pages. But I want you to ignore this chapter and these pages. Because they're not relevant to our business. So I do not want you implementing these things. You can read them, but don't try and implement these things because you'll get stuck on them. And then along with that, I sent him some of the things that I had to make decisions about and things that I had to write. I sent that to him with it and said, here's this piece and this piece and this piece. Now go implement it. So if you're going to give them other people's trainings, you have to go through and filter it for them. The other side of this is@replacemyself.com which is my site, we have created training for Filipino workers where it's already separated. We have lots of training, probably 30 different trainings, where it's separated into what the workers going to do and what they're going to learn and the decisions that you're going to make. And so we tell you, here's what your worker is going to learn. And we tell them, here's what you're learning, here's how you do it. And we tell you, here's a decision you need to make. Tell your worker this decision and you give them the decision and they have exactly what's relevant to them so they don't disappear. Because otherwise, when you give them someone else's training product, they get to a certain point where they have to make a decision and they don't know how to make that decision, and they're scared to let you down that they're going to make the wrong decision. And rather than do that, they rather disappear. So what we've done is separated it really well so that you can give them the training, you know exactly what you need to do to make this successful, and they know exactly what they need need to do to get the work done. So that's an option@replacemyself.com that you might consider. So again, training is really important. It takes care of lots of problems, especially right in the beginning when you've hired someone. This is how I do my hiring process. I hope this is helpful to you.
