A short YouTube advice video (by John Jonas) on outsourcing to Filipino virtual assistants. The core message: explicitly set expectations and encourage VAs to report problems instead of 'disappearing'—this prevents anxiety-driven silence. John supports the point with personal anecdotes and offers a recruiting process at 1vaoa.com.
Chapters
Tip number two in outsourcing to the Philippines, setting expectations. Hey, my name is John, and this is my second tip in hiring Filipino vas. How to set the right expectations. So one of the things about the Philippines is that they want to make you happy, and they want to make sure that you're happy. And this drives most of the way that they work. So let me tell you a quick story. I was in the Philippines, this was in 2010, and I met a girl who had been working for a man in Norway. And for the last two years, he hadn't given her anything to do. He had just been paying her every month and hadn't assigned her anything. And she says to me, I'm so worried. Like, I want to make sure that I'm doing everything right, but I don't know what to do. What do I do about this? And I was like, you know, that's amazing that you want to continue to do this. And. And it's also amazing he's paid you for two years without doing anything. But the point was she was worried that she wasn't doing what he wanted. And for two years, he hadn't said anything to her other than sent her money every month because I think he just wanted to have someone there in case he needed something. So in the Philippines, if you don't set expectations of how they're going to work, then you will make them worry about whether or not you like their work. So to contrast this with other cultures, in other cultures, if something's going wrong with their work, they'll just say yes to you. Like, is stuff getting done? Yes. Are you working on it? Yes. How's things going? Yes. In the Philippines, that's not how it works. They get shy, is what they call it, about the way that they're working. So they don't want to disappoint you. They want to make sure that you're happy. And so if they don't know what's going on, then they'll ghost you, is what they'll call. They'll just disappear. And so for me, here's what I do to prevent this situation. When I start with them, I set the right expectations of saying, here are the results I expect. Here's what I want you to do. Here's the training. When something goes wrong, I expect you to come to me and I'm willing to help you with it. If you watch my previous video, daily communication will significantly help you solve this. After you've set this expectation of when something goes wrong, I need you to Come to me. So my brother once hired a programmer, and he said, this guy was amazing. For three weeks, he was doing great work and was turning in great stuff to him. And then all of a sudden, he stopped communicating. And for a week, he didn't say anything to my brother. And my brother texted me and said, hey, what's going on? What's wrong? And I said, well, he ran into a problem. Something isn't right. Send him an email and say, hey, what's going on? What problem did you run into that I can help you solve? So my brother sends this email to him, and he gets an email back from him, and he texts me the next day and says, you were right. He had a problem that I knew how to solve really quickly for him, and I solved it. And he's back to work really quickly. So without setting that expectation of, when you come into a run into a problem, you need to come to me, then they're going to disappear for you on the other end of that. After I had been hiring Filipino workers for years, I hired a girl. And the first thing I told her was, hey, when you run into a problem, when you get stuck on something, you have to come to me. What you can't do is you can't disappear. And I told her that I made it very clear, and she did really great work for, like, three months. And then she sent me an email one day that said, sir, you told me I can't disappear, so I'm sending you an email. I don't want to send this email. I'm really scared to send it, but you told me I can't disappear. So. And then she went into detail about this problem that she had, and she didn't know what to do about it. And to me, the problem was like, oh, yeah, I know how to solve that. That's really simple. But it was just the fact that I told her, don't disappear. Come to me when you have problems. And then over the next three months, I had worked with her in every situation that she had so that she knew if she comes to me, I'm willing to help her solve the problem. So outsourcing tip number two. Set the right expectations with your worker by letting them know that you're there to help them and they shouldn't disappear. My name is John Jonas, and you can get more of how I hire Filipino VAs@1vaoa.com. I walk you through my entire process of how I find a great va almost every time. I never ask the question of, I don't know if I'm going to find a good VA anymore because my outsourcing process or my my recruiting process allows me to know, pretty dang surely that I'm always gonna find a great VA by following the process. You can find that process at 1vaoa.com Sam.
