What To Do When Your VA Keeps Making Mistakes

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 165. Is your OFS making mistakes and how to correct it? So making mistakes is part of life. I love the saying that if you want to speed up your success rate, then double your failure rate. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to fail. The more quicker that you fail, the more you're going to succeed. And I've had my share of failures. Like, when I started outsourcing, man, that was painful. I tried so many things before I got it right. And then since then, you know, I've had a lot of failures with people that I've hired. Not that the people didn't work out. Just the way that we went about. The tasks that they went to do didn't work out initially. Well, most of them I got to work out in the end. It maybe took some time, but it is frustrating. Well, failing is always frustrating. Anytime you make a mistake, it's frustrating, but it's extra frustrating when someone else is. Is failing or making mistakes on your time, and then you're responsible for it. So that's hard, and that's what I want to address today. So if your ofs, your online Filipino specialist is making a bunch of mistakes, let me give you some suggestions. So, number one, ask them why they're struggling to do this thing right. Like, I've had quite a few times where I've given instructions. It seems to me that it's clear they're doing it, but they're not doing it right. And so then I'll ask, like, hey, what. What's going on here that is preventing you from doing this correctly? Do you not understand something? What have I not explained correctly? Or what are you worried about? Where are you worried about making a mistake? This question alone will solve a lot of problems. And I've had this solve quite a few problems where they're like, oh, I don't know about this thing, or this thing bothers me. And usually when that happens, I'm like, oh, yeah, I can fix that. And then we get right on track and things start working well. Another answer that I might get from them would be, I'm just struggling personally. I need to get my life in order and I can make it work. I'm like, okay, well, yeah, we need to make this work, because I can't handle. I can't have these mistakes continuing. And very often that alone will change the way that they work, they'll get it in gear and they'll start doing things better and making fewer mistakes. The next thing to consider is have you put yourself in the position where everything runs through you. So the Philippines is a very authority respecting country. The way that they are is that if someone else is an authority or if someone else is responsible for this work, then they do the work, but then they pass it off to this person. It's their job to find mistakes and to correct mistakes and make sure the work is correct. Have you put yourself in this position so that they do some work, they make mistakes, they don't really care, it's not their problem because they're going to send it to you and you're going to be the one correcting it if that's the case. There's a couple ways that I have tried to fix this. Number one, I've put a layer between me and them of quality assurance, that quality assurance, their job is to fix mistakes and they fix a lot of stuff for me, they're still not fixing everything. And today I sent a couple different things to my quality assurance person and the person doing the original work saying, hey, here are mistakes you're making and let's fix this. So I'm hoping that by pointing that out to both of them like this is your job to correct these mistakes and this is your job to get them right in the first place, hoping that they come back to me better. So if you've set yourself up to be the person that everything runs through, you can expect that they will continue to make mistakes like this until you give them authority to do it themselves, to get it right themselves, that it's expected, that it comes from them correctly, that you're not going to correct it. And then number three, going along with that, here's what I have found is give them a title and make it very clear that they're responsible for the output. So titles are important in the Philippines and titles aren't very important to me. So I've never really wanted to give titles to people. I just want you to do your work. But in the Philippines it's important they talk about their titles, they when they're going to have, when they're going to go for another job, that title becomes very important to them. And so I have given people titles like you are the onlinejobs Ph, social media manager or you are the content manager at onlinejobs Ph, things like that, where they know, oh, I'm in charge of this, you're the data verification supervisor. It's your job to make sure that this data verification is done correctly. Whether it's you doing it or it's people that are working for you doing it, it's your job. You need to make sure it's done correctly. Not me. I'm not going to be the one that's going to correct this anymore. So giving them a title and responsibility has made a really, really big difference for me and my team. Outside of that training, man, training will solve all kinds of things. And even if you give different training, like, here's how we've done this, here's how you're gonna do this now, or here's how someone else does this, or hey, let me talk you through this again, even though I've already done it six times. Training will often clarify things and make things better. You can also set better expectations in your training. That's one of the reasons why we created VA's Made Easy was so that you could have training that you give to them which will set expectations. It's intended for the virtual worker working with you where they understand they're responsible for these things and you're responsible for other things. They're responsible for the quality of the work. That's what VA's made easy is designed for, to give training to people that you don't have to create. And it sets expectations correctly with them. In the end, expect this to happen. Expect mistakes to happen. I know that anybody that I hire is going to make mistakes. They're not going to do it the way that I envision it at first, and I'm going to have to correct and I'm going to have to teach and I'm going to have to provide feedback. And over time, we'll get it right. And once you get it right, man, it really changes the way that you work in the future. Because once you've gotten it right once, well, then moving forward, that thing is going to be correct and they're more likely to get other things correct, and it just snowballs from there.