John Jonas argues that trust and genuine kindness toward Filipino virtual assistants creates loyalty and better work. A listener named Danielle shares how her VA explicitly credits trust as the reason she stays committed. Jonas recommends offering training and being authentic rather than performative.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 136, Trust, Consideration and Kindness. So I believe that when you do good in the world, it comes back to you a lot, like tenfold. And we see this all the time and yet still sometimes it's hard to believe, like if I do good, am I going to see anything from this? And often you don't see anything. It almost always returns to you. We also as people have like these self protective instincts where we want to make sure that we get our fair share and nobody else takes advantage of us. And it's super interesting. What I've seen with people working in the Philippines and just with people in general is that when we go out of the way to show trust and consideration and kindness to people, what we get in return is more than we gave. So I get this email from Danielle who she shared a message conversation that she had with one of her ofs and I'm going to read the messages and you can, if you're looking at this on YouTube, hopefully you can see it. Here's, here's what happened. So Danielle sent this message. She said, just want to say thank you for all the work you do. You really have been so great at tracking so many different and new tasks. Thank you for your input, suggestions and the willingness to try and learn new things. So her OFS responds with wow, thank you for your appreciation. Turning red emoji. I love what I'm doing because of your trust, consideration, kindness and everything. Another red cheeks emoji. Consideration and kindness. I kind of expect that's part of being a human. The trust part of that conversation from her OFS is really interesting to me. So this OFS feels like, I mean her boss was considerate and kind, but she also feels like her boss trusts her, that Danielle trusts her. And because of that she does good work, she loves her job, she contributes to the company and that's a really big deal. And I've seen this over and over and over again and especially with the Philippines. So in the Philippines, they want to trust you, they want you to trust them. And gaining the trust of your ofs, getting them to trust you and trusting them to do good work causes all kinds of things in the way that they will do their work, they'll love their work, they'll love working for you, they'll love their job, they'll talk about you, they'll brag about you, they'll refer people to you, they'll do what needs to be done to ensure that they're doing their job correctly and successfully and that your business is succeeding. So trust, as evidence from this conversation is a really big deal in the Philippines. One of the ways that you can gain the trust of your OFS is to provide them training. It shows them that you care. It shows them that you want them to succeed. It lets you trust them doing processes that you didn't have to create. At least if you use vasmadeasy.com which is the training that we create for you to give to your ofs. Trust. Try and learn to trust your people and learn to gain their trust in you. So, as an aside, when we were in Europe, we visited the Hohenzollern Castle, which is just outside of Albstadt, Germany. The castle's from, like the 1100s or the 1200s, and it was a fortress that was really never in jeopardy of being conquered until. Until gunpowder. There's a hill a couple miles away that you can never really attack this castle because it's on a hill until gunpowder happened in the 1800s, and then you could shoot at it from a long distance away. Such an amazing castle. It was so cool. On the other side of it, we went to the. This. This castle in Fusen, which is the new Schwanstein Castle, which was built in the 1880s, and it was built for King Ludwig to pretend that he was a medieval king. And yet this is the castle that everyone talks about, even though it's kind of fake. Like he built it to pretend that he was medieval. He grew up in the castle across the street and built this castle as like a show of. Look at this amazing castle. And then that's the castle that Disney built that Disney bases all their castles on. The castle that's in Disneyland is based off of this new Schwanstein Castle. And it looks amazing, but it was like he built himself a throne room that he never put a throne in because it was pretend. And. And then he died. And there's not a throne there in the throne room. And it's just sitting there. And the whole thing felt fake to all of us. All my kids were like, that was silly. Like, that whole castle was silly. Where the Hohenzollern castle was real, legitimate, authentic, and amazing. They loved it. And that is. I feel like that's part of working with your ofs and gaining their trust is authenticity and being real and expressing your concerns and showing them how maybe you're struggling or maybe they're struggling and saying something and being nice about it and being considerate and kind and gaining trust.
