I realized recently that I’m sarcastic with my kids.
Too often I joke with them by being hard on them or making fun of them.
It’s not good.
I had to take a step back and change my approach.
Just be nice.
I’m working on it…I fear it’s a long road.
One of the things people call me out on is that I’m too nice to my Filipino team.
How can I give my employees benefits and all that time off? I keep someone on for too long when their performance declines!
Most importantly, how do I protect myself from being taken advantage of?
Have you found yourself in this situation?
“I have done everything to be very accommodating and understanding to my Filipino worker. He has been with me over the years and we have had a good working relationship. But what I noticed recently is that it’s always one excuse or another. From family members dying which I am sympathetic about and understanding to disappearing for 2 days in a row. They reappears apologizing and I always understand and forgive him. It’s like because he knows I am an understanding boss. He takes advantage of my kindness and takes it for WEAKNESS .
I know you promote being understanding and kind to the Filipino workers but at what point does one draw the line from being abused and taken for granted to where their actions affect our business performance.
His disappearance has yet again affected our targeted web design project completion dates.
This has happened time and time again and he acknowledges it but he is still doing it
at what point does one say enough is enough and fire?”
First, I think it’s fantastic that Desi O. is going out of her way to help out her worker. I agree it seems like she’s being taken advantage of.
So, how do you prevent this from happening? What do you do when this happens to you.
I can afford to be nice because I set expectations early on.
I tell my OFS team that I expect a daily report. I want to see the things they have done during the workday.
I also set deadlines for critical things. My team knows that they need to focus on important work. I call them out when I notice things are not moving fast enough. In fact, just today I sent an email to one of my web people and said
“Hey, it has been 5 days since I’ve had an update about X project. Why?
You do good work, but I need better updates from you.”
Most importantly, I give feedback. I call them out when I see they’re making mistakes or taking advantage of the situation.
I have called out a few employees about their lack of productivity or when they’re not paying attention. I talked about it when my OFS uploaded the wrong video.
My OFS team knows that I’ll go out of my way to be the best boss that I can be if they go out of their way to be great employees.
If that doesn’t work, it is your right to let them go if you’ve given them multiple chances.
Also, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is why a good recruitment process is essential. Listening to your gut is important. The one I laid out in OneVAAway.com can help prevent most of this from happening.
As far as I can remember, I only have two people who were always out because they were sick.
One eventually resigned because she was really sick. We didn’t want to let her go and offered to keep helping. But she chose to leave because her health problems were getting in the way.
The other one came back to work and took on more responsibilities than she did when she first started working for us.
John