Tips for onboarding a new Filipino VA hire - Practical Advice

How to onboard your new Filipino hire. Hey, my name is John Jonas and over the years I've hired dozens of workers in the Philippines. In fact, right now I have I think 36 full time VAs in the Philippines working for me. Designers, social media people, content writers, programmers, customer support people all across the spectrum. And so in this, in this video, I'm going to talk about my onboarding process. So there's a lot of ways to do this, but I'm just going to walk you through how I bring someone on board. So the first thing for me is to give them a job. So I will tell someone, hey, I want to hire you. Here's the salary, I'm going to pay you. Here's, here's the hours, days, whatever. I want you to start on Monday or whatever the day is that we've negotiated. So one of the mistakes I see people make is they want to tell someone, hey, I don't know about this. So I want you to start doing some work and we'll do this two week trial thing. The problem is you're going to, you're going to create a bad situation from the beginning. They're not going to do great work. You're not going to have someone good. For me, if I've gone through the recruiting process, I know I found someone good. My recruiting process is set well. So if I go through the process, I found someone good and I'm going to give them a job. So that's my first thing next, to use a contract or not. So a lot of you want to use a contract and it's totally fine. I don't use a contract for a couple reasons. One, it's unenforceable, really. I'm not going to travel to the Philippines to go enforce a labor contract with someone now. But what I found over the years is if you have reasonable expectations and you treat the person well, which I'll talk about in a minute, then the contract is completely unnecessary. Filipinos are so loyal, they want to work for you anyway. You'll never have a problem with them breaking the contract. So often employers want to like set all these rules for a worker. Like you have to be online at this time to pay you only according to the time that you. That was tracked and I'm only going to pay you this hour. You can do that and try the heavy handed approach. It's just not as effective as if you have a little bit of flexibility with people and you learn to treat them well and you treat them as if they're in your office, rather than treating them as a robot on the other side of the world that you can just fire and get rid of. So that's my second piece in onboarding. I don't use a contract. You can, and now's the time to use it if you're going to. So my next step is to give them instructions in my policies and how I work. So my number one thing is I require daily communication. I want a report from them every day in that report. So I'm not a stickler for these three things, but when you start out, this is a good, this is a good starting point. So I want them to answer three questions. Number one, what did you do today? Number two, what problems did you run into? And number three, what can I help you with? So in answering these three questions, you're going to find like, oh, you didn't really do anything today, or oh, you have this problem that you're working on or you have this problem that you can't solve that I need to help you with. So the daily report does, to me will keep everything on track. It'll keep things running smoothly. That's my number one. So second, I will introduce people to people on my team. I will talk about how we deal with payments or how we do paid time off or holidays or what my initial expectations from them are, what they're going to be working on. And then I will give them their first task. And so at the end of that first email, usually I'll say, hey, here's your first task, but I'm going to give you instructions in another email. And so then the next piece of the onboarding is the actual instructions that they're going to get. I'm going to give them video instructions, audio instructions, written instructions, whatever is appropriate for that task. I'm going to give those instructions to them and I'm probably going to write up a big long piece about it. And this may be in an email, it may be in the project management system, but those instructions are really important at the end of those instructions. Now I'm going to get into a little bit of the Philippines culture and the number one problem you're going to run into. So at the end of those instructions, what I will say is, hey, I know this is your first task. I know that you're scared to work for me and I know that this is going to be difficult and at some point you're going to get stuck on something. And when you do, here's what I want you to do. Number one, I want you to try it, try and figure it out. See what you can do. Ask a friend what they know. Google it. Just see what you can do. When you get stuck and you feel like you can't make progress, I need you to come to me and tell me what the problem is and I'm going to help you solve it. And if I don't help you solve it, then I'm going to find someone else to help us solve it together. What I don't want you to do is to disappear. And I know that this is scary for you. When you get stuck, you want to disappear. Please don't disappear. So that's my instruction to them. Here's why. So in the Philippines, the number one problem you run into is they, they call this shyness where they're shy. Really what I've seen, what my interpretation of it is, is that they don't want to let you down. They don't want to lose face. They really want to make you happy. And if they don't know if they're going to make you happy or if they're scared that you're going to be upset at them or if they're, that they're going to do it wrong because they don't understand some of the instructions, their initial reaction is to disappear. And this disappearing is really like the number one problem you'll run into. And if you'll take care of this in the onboarding process, then you'll have a much better situation. Not that you can completely take care of it in the onboarding, but if you'll set the stage for doing this correctly, for fixing this problem, you'll have such a good experience long term. So the way that I do this is to tell them, hey, I'm here to help you and when you get in trouble, when you get stuck, come to me. And then you need to be willing to help them. And so that kind of manages your expectations a little bit. Like you're not just going to give them this process, that they're going to do it wonderfully perfect the first time. You're going to work with them through this and you can expect them to get stuck. And if they come to you with a problem, you win. Like now you know, you can get this person to communicate with you. They're not going to disappear on you. That's a big, big deal. So the next piece then is to give them access. Like you need to give them access to your email or to the email that they need or to systems that they need or to hosting or whatever it is that they need access to to do their job. Now in this, often people say, how can I trust them? Well, on some level you're going to have to give them some trust. And generally Filipino workers working for foreign employers are very trustworthy. That doesn't mean you should go give someone your PayPal account right now. But you should pay attention to signs that they're trying to be honest with you, because you'll probably see them pretty quickly. But you're going to need to give them access to some systems upfront so that they can do their work. So the next thing that I have for you in onboarding is a tip about how to do this. So you give someone their instructions. And what I will often do is to try and avoid the disappearing Filipino problem where you say, here's the instructions, go do this. I will say, hey, here's these instructions. Tell me what you think I want you to do. And that way they're giving you feedback on your instructions. And if they tell you like something completely crazy that isn't what you instructed them to do, then you can say like, oh well, maybe my instructions weren't very good and I need to go back and modify my instruction. Or if they tell you exactly what you want, then great, move forward and be like, okay, now go do your job. Go do the first task. Expect them to come back to you and give them feedback. What this does is it gives that person an out where they're gonna, they don't have to be embarrassed by doing the task wrong. And then you're mad at them and it gives you an out where you can correct your training upfront. So I will very often ask people for feedback on my training or I'll say, what do you think about this? I've given them the training. What do you think? Or tell me what you're supposed to do based on what I've told you here, because I'm not sure my instructions are very good. If you'll do that, you'll solve so many problems with the disappearing Filipino and you'll set the stage for a good long term relationship. So my name is John Jonas. I have a full system where I'll talk about how to onboard people and how to train people and how to set how to avoid the disappearing Filipino problem right from the beginning as you're, as you're hiring them because you can take steps in the hiring process where you'll, you'll set them up to trust you. Moving on. That's available at 1vaoa.com. It's $49. But I guarantee you'll have a good experience, you'll hire a good VA or I'll give you your money.