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John Jonas, creator of Virtual Assistant Tool, and YouTube Producer Nate Woodbury share with us what it’s like to manage a virtual team. They’ve hired people specifically from the Philippines, and they’re here today to share with us their experience of managing a virtual team. Tune in if you’re looking to hire a virtual employee.
Welcome back. In a previous episode, we talked about how to build or how to hire your virtual team. So in this episode, we’re going to talk about how to manage your team. Okay, managing a team in the Philippines have to give you tons of credit. So this is John Jonas. He’s the guy who taught me to outsource. He taught me everything. I remember learning about outsourcing in the in the 4-hour workweek. And I actually I loved that book. I listen to it many times. But the concept of outsourcing seems so foreign to me. It really did. It seemed like an impossible thing for me to outsource. But I listened to audio you’ve created and I realized, “I could do this right now.” So within 36 hours, I’d hired my first virtual assistant. That’s so awesome. So, anyway. Now, we’re… I’ve been doing this for 9 years. How long have you been hiring in the Philippines? 13 years now. 13 years, okay. So, we’ve learned a lot. I originally learned a lot and a lot of the things that I do now were because of what you taught me and it really worked on how to manage a team. So what’s kind of the first pieces of advice that you’d share on managing or leading your team?
Okay. So, first thing is the opposite of what everybody thinks. When everybody is building a virtual team, they’re like, “I don’t know if I can trust that person.” Yeah. Right? That is everybody’s first fear. I had that fear for sure. Yeah and so did I. I want to turn that around and say, “They don’t trust you.” And as soon as you stop worrying about, “I don’t know if I can trust them.” Start worrying about, Do they, trust me?” It’ll change their attitude towards you, their work ethic towards you. It’ll change everything. That’s when you will start to succeed. As soon as you say, “What can I do to gain their trust?”
I love that. I’ll just echo what you say. So what’s your second piece of advice?
So the second thing is… And this is kind of a general management thing across the board but… This is especially important in the Philippines. So, in the Philippines, they thrive off of feedback and positive feedback. So, when you have something negative to say to the Philippines… There’s a culture of pleasing. Like, they want to make you happy. And so, if they do something to let you down or you’re disappointed in them then rather than being like, “Okay, I’ll tackle that”, they’re like, “Argh, this is really bad.” “I guess I’ll go have to find another job.” Yeah, “Go find another job.” Right? So, when you’re dealing with them, always give positive feedback so that they know you care about them. If you’re going to give negative feedback, give positive feedback then negative feedback then positive feedback. And what it does is it alleviates their worry about disappointing you, about letting you down. Because that’s supercritical. Because that’s the number 1 problem people have with the Philippines is the disappearing virtual assistant. The disappearing VA. That’s what people say. And if you will try to gain their trust and give them positive feedback, you’ll basically eliminate this problem. So that’s something that I learned from you in the beginning but it’s something that… I would say today, I am still not where I want to be with that. But I put a lot of attention to it. I try and focus on the positive. And some examples of things that I do is when a client sends me a message of compliment saying, “Hey, you did a great job in this video.” I’ll copy and paste it right then and send over to my team because they did. They did most of the work, right? And I’ll… You know, whenever I’m watching a video that they edit for my channel. And you know, a vlog and they use their awesome creativity, I’ll just say, “This was amazing.” Because it’s easy. It’s especially easy for me to just say, “Oop, can you tweak this here? Can you fix that there? Can you fix that there?” When like 99% of it was perfect. And so, that’s something that I have to remind my self because I’ve found that just like you said… They value it so much.
Yeah, and there’s this… This is general management, right? But this is as especially important in the Philippines. Now, one thing I want to bring up is tracking time. I’ve kind of evolved the way that I track my team’s time. It’s just through trust. I don’t micromanage their time, I have them report their hours just so that they can be conscious of it. When they tell me at the end of the month, “I worked 160”, I pay them for 160 hours. As long as the work, you know… They’re getting… The projects are getting completed, the progress, everyone is in communication. That’s what I really look at. What would you say about that? I mean, I see you’re nodding your head.
Yeah, this is what I do too. And I’ve tried different time tracking things. And you can get stuff that’ll like to sit on their desktop and it’ll take screenshots every couple of minutes and report to you exactly what they’re doing. They don’t like that. They hate it. And I’ve done it. And in fact, I developed a tool to do it because so many employers want it. I don’t use it. But it’s available for free at virtualassistanttool.com. Yeah, when I used it, I didn’t have anyone quit over it but I kind of felt the idea like, “This is… This is… I don’t know if I want to continue working with you” type of attitude. I had that kind of feedback too. And I don’t think productivity would’ve gone up. They don’t like it. So, I don’t do it. I know people that do. And frankly some employer… Like, they have different personalities, right? Some employers need that.
They need to know that you’re 100% productive all the time. There is something where I track time but I tried and let my team know why I am using it. So on my project management tool that I use, I am really wanting to track how much time does a task spent in this column and then it moves to this person and goes over here. So I can… I really use that initially because we’re having some bottlenecks and I’m like, “How can we fix this?” But that’s all that I use it for it. I’ve never gone to my team and say, “Hey, I see that you’ve only worked 7 and a half hours on this day, what’s up with that? You know, you could’ve…” You know, that… I don’t know. Don’t do it. Yeah, don’t do it. My video guy here mentioned that the autofocus was off. I am not going to go back and restate that. So, sorry for the blurriness of the video. But we’re just going to continue on what we’re talking about. Sweet. So what’s another piece of advice that you have on for managing the team?
Okay, so most people don’t want to hear this. That’s the type of stuff that we want to share in the video so go for it. But they don’t want to hear it. Train. Train them? Give training. So training will do a multitude of things but… So the first thing about managing your team is it gives you time. If you will teach them things, it gives you time back in your life. And I get that it takes time to train someone. I get it but it’s super important. Number 2 this is special important In the Philippines. They want to know that you’re there for them, basically. And if you’re willing to train them then they’ll start to trust you. And it’s one of the biggest things. So, I remember the first guy that I ever hired. When he… He told me… Probably 4 years after I hired him. He said, “Sir when I started working for you, I was so scared. I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know what was going to happen. And then you started giving me training and it changed my life.” And that guy still works for me today. And he’s completely amazing today, right? I can ask him to do anything. He comes to me all the time with like, “Hey, we should be doing this in our business and you’re not doing it. Here’s why and here’s how.” Right? But in the beginning, he didn’t know anything and he just saw… Oh, he’s willing to give me some training. He’s willing to invest in this relationship. I’m all in. That was kind of the thought process. His thought process was, “I’m all in.” And if you’re now willing to give that training… And I get it sometimes. It’s a program. You’re not going to train a programmer, right? But in so many things, if you’re willing to give that training, it’ll bring them in. If you’re not willing to get it, then they’re hesitant. And they’ll just kind of standoff. Giving training will create a rock star worker. Awesome.
So something that I’ve discovered just a few weeks ago. That now looking back, it’s like, “Why didn’t I do it sooner?” I went to the Philippines. So having a team of 10 employees that have never met each other other than 2 of them are brothers and these 2 are brother and sister. It made such a difference to actually go there and meet them. And for obvious reasons… But I am going to share one that I think… It wasn’t obvious to me. Having met my team now, I see them more as human beings. And I am feeling the emotion when I say his because it’s so easy to communicate back and forth by text message or in messenger or something. And we’re just communicating with the machine. Until like they forget that they’re human beings that have personalities, that are amazing and that they are so capable. And we haven’t… You know, it’s not that we haven’t any conflicts but just think about the difference and communication. And you know, here I am. We’re talking about managing a team. Here I am managing a team of 10 people and yet, I’m just connected from a fact that they’re human beings.
So having met them… So, I want to go back. I mean… I want to go back and associate with these great people. And I wish that I would’ve gone to the Philippines a lot sooner. That’s one of the things that I tell people often. It’s… I show a picture. Look, these are humans. They comb their hair, they put on different clothes every day. And if you’ll treat them as a human instead of as a robot, it makes all the difference in the management of them. Well, thanks so much. I appreciate you joining me in this episode. Who else would I bring on to an episode like this? So hopefully you found it helpful. Be sure to subscribe if you’re on YouTube. If you’re watching this on LinkedIn, you can’t subscribe but you can follow. Because I’m posting videos like this on LinkedIn now. And we will see you in the next amazing episode.