John Jonas explains why Filipino virtual assistants sometimes seem unmotivated: cultural assumptions about online work, generational habits, temporary motivation dips, micromanagement that kills initiative, and exhaustion from juggling multiple jobs. He shares teammate quotes and the steps he took to help, including asking how to support them and letting them change tools or roles.
Chapters
Laziness why your OFS sometimes works mindlessly. So this is the fourth episode out of five to eight about why OFS sometimes work mindlessly. Laziness, man. Sometimes people just get lazy. It just happens. Some say the rising generation is lazy. Sometimes the work itself lends itself to laziness. Sometimes as an OFS gets more comfortable with a job, they may get more lazy. You may become more relaxed. And for a lot of people in the Philippines, they think the only online jobs that exists are data entry jobs. That's what they've heard about growing up, is data entry. And data entry is pretty mindless. And so some people equate online work with mindless data entry work, even though that's not necessarily what it is. In fact, most of the time, that's not what it is. Now this is changing with the push to remote work with COVID But here's some of the quotes from my team about laziness causing mindlessness. For some Filipinos, mediocre mindless work is the standard. Yes, there are many out there who still want to do their best, but there are also many who are just exhausting. I know who sent this. As he. As he talks about this, I think he's talking about the rising generation, the younger people. He's older. And the work ethic may not be the same anymore, although very often we find it is the same. It's just different. People are different. Here's another one. Sometimes people just performed what exactly told them to do, especially those already employed long enough. As long as the particular tasks are done, they think it's already okay. They no longer care or think more about the possible problem that it may cause. Here's another one. Sometimes it's not mindless work. Sometimes it's just a work schlump. They care very much. They just need a little push to get them out of it. And that one's interesting to me because I've seen this with my team a few times where someone's really, really capable, and I know they're capable, and yet they're doing really mediocre work. And when I push them, often they'll. They'll jump out of it and start doing really, really great work again. And sometimes we have to change their role a little bit or change their responsibilities or move them around or shift. But often they'll very, very. They'll start doing very, very good work again. Other parts of this are the employer's fault. It's our fault. Like, we've given mindless work, we've created mindless expectations. We've forced them to run everything through us before they do anything, which means we're the ones in charge, we're the ones in authority, and we've trained them to be mindless because we're going to make sure that it's done right. You might want to consider if that's the situation you have created with your team. I had created it with some of my team, so I had to take steps to affect that. I've asked my team, like, hey, I need you to do better quality work. And I know you're capable of doing it because I've seen it from you. What can I do to help you with that? What can I do to improve the quality of your work? And then they've come back to me with, like, hey, I'd really like to use this software tool to make it much easier so I could focus on better quality rather than quantity. Or sometimes they may have taken another job and their laziness is due to exhaustion, like mental or physical exhaustion. You can ask, like, hey, I noticed quality has declined recently. What's. What's causing this? Are you overworked? Do you have another job? Is something bothering you? Are you stuck on something? What's causing this decline? So in the next episode, we're going to talk about the family culture and how that plays into all of this. Then in the next episode, we'll talk about solutions to this.
