Here’s what “Clean up your play mess” looks like to an 8 year old boy:
He wasn’t careless or mindless about it…he told me
“I did clean up…I’m still playing with those!”
At least he thought it through.
A while back I sent a newsletter about how my OFS had published a video that was horribly edited. The video started mid-sentence, had no context, and was just a bad edit.
Yet, someone else (who didn’t do the edit) still published it.
It wasn’t thought through by either person.
Why?
I talked about this with my friend Dennis Yu, who runs a social media agency and has hundreds of OFS working for him. It turns out I’m not alone in this. He replied:
The “mindless” activity is one of the biggest challenges we have with VAs.
Dennis told me how one of his OFS was posting immigration Law posts (intended for one of his clients) onto his agency social media accounts. How does that make sense? Why would the agency audience care about immigration law???
I’m sure Dennis and I aren’t the only 2 to have this happen to them, so I decided to press my team about why work sometimes gets done mindlessly. I wanted them to be honest with me about it. So I encouraged them to send me their answers anonymously.
Here’s what I found out.
1. Fear is a large driver of Filipino behavior.
2. The Power-Distance of Philippine culture is strongly at play.
3. Often for VAs, quantity gets emphasized over quality because it’s visible
4. Sometimes they just get lazy. “I just want to complete my tasks.”
5. Lack of company culture – Filipinos are very family-oriented. If they feel disconnected in the business, they just don’t care.
That’s just a summary. My team gave me detailed answers. So I figured I would talk about these answers one by one in the following emails. I’m also going to show you the solutions that my OFS team recommended, the solutions that I thought of and implemented, and how these things are going so far. I also compiled the entire series here.
Fixing the mindless work of OFS — starting next week.
John
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