Welcome back to part two of a video on what business owners
get wrong hiring in the Philippines. And if you haven't
already checked out part number one that we link down below in
the description. Now I'm helping business owners all over the
world get started with hiring remote teams, but also get their
technology people and systems organized so they can grow more
successful businesses. And we've already talked a little bit
about what are the perils of hiring offshore and the absolute
basics that a business owner needs to get right in their
mindset and how they see other people and some of the basics of
getting the economics right of working with a remote team. I
want to talk a bit more about some of the practicals. Now in
actually making sure that you and your team are going to work
well together as you're growing and scaling a remote team,
particularly if you're choosing to hire in the Philippines. Now
number one mistake that most business owners make is not
actually documenting the systems in their business not writing
down how things actually work. And what can happen there is you
have employees leave the business and nothing's been
documented. And all of a sudden, you need to train someone from
scratch again. And we've got a number of videos on our channel
specifically on how to write great business systems, and how
to create an online digital Standard Operating Procedures
Manual. So you can make sure everything in your business is
documented. And you can delegate more tasks to the team, as well
as rapidly onboard new team members into your business.
Check out those videos. If you'd like to learn more about
systems, that's a particular area of passion for me. Second
thing that business owners get wrong is expecting a unicorn,
typically someone will hire their first virtual assistant.
And they will expect them to do a bit of everything, customer
service, updating the website chasing bills and finances
reconciling and bookkeeping. And if you were to ask anyone in
your home country to do all of those different tasks, it would
be very obvious that they are different tasks based on
different skill sets. But not only that different styles of
work completely, do you really want the same person to be doing
your bookkeeping and expecting them to have a high degree of
accuracy and a procedure based mindset,
if you also want them to create graphics for your social media,
which is going to be a much more creative process. And you want
that person to be expressive, and perhaps be a little bit
thinking outside of the box in that kind of work. No, those are
two completely different roles. And so for many people, when
they hire their first international team member,
they're expecting someone to just do a bit of everything for
them, I implore you to ensure that your roles are well
defined, and that if you have to hire two or three different
people for different roles as you expand your team, then it's
going to go much better. By the way, just hiring one person is
probably going to be a little bit of a challenge for you
because you can have the risk of people ghosting things not
working out. And also you have the challenge of your first
international hire is probably going to take a bit of time for
you to get used to actually working with them and get used
to someone working from a different culture who is going
to have different traits and different ways of working. So
hiring two or three people to build a team means that you're
actually going to have your team members have some buddies to
work with. And then you have the opportunity to work with
different diverse personalities as you get used to building your
business in an international way. Third mistake that business
owners make all the time is not actually doing the extra work
required on the HR side of the business. And many business
owners will just go ahead and hire remote employees, assign
them some tasks in maybe a SATA or a task management program.
And just expect things to get done. While forgetting all of
the basics of HR management, like performance reviews, check
in meetings, daily huddles or stand ups, weekly reviews of
tasks, strategy meetings that happen every month or every
quarter. These are all things that you need to do with an
international team, not just with your local team, and making
sure that all of these things are in place, like making sure
that there's adequate pay raises and reviews that there's
performance management frameworks in place. But there's
even a feedback system for team members to create and share
feedback with you means that you're going to have a much
better symbiosis working with your team. Now for many business
owners that we see, and I mentioned this in part one is
you know, they treat someone as an other or treat someone as as
someone completely different to their main business. And my
advice to you is instead to treat your international team
members as if they were working in your office, but you just
kind of treat them as if they happen to be working from a
different location. And we've all got used to that throughout
the Coronavirus pandemic, working from different locations
and many of us working from home, but treat your
international team in exactly the same way. They just happen
to be working in a different location. But everything that
you would apply to your Australian or your local team.
If you're based in the US or another country, you want to
then apply that right across the board. So you're effective no
matter where your team are working from and it effectively
makes you know the culture or the nationality or the race of
who you're working with. Irrelevant. Yes, you may be
different economies and you may be paying different rates for
those that you're employing, but it is irrelevant where somebody
is apart from the cultural traits in the how you build a
relationship. With the individuals that you're working
with, I think we've kind of slid into my next point here number
four, which is differentiating teams. And what I've shared
there is that it's most important for your team to feel
like one team. And here's some basic tips for that are where
I've seen business owners get wrong is where they'll have one
team meeting for the offshore team. And then one team meeting
for the local team, or they'll do boneheaded things like take a
local based team out for lunch, the remote team just kind of
like completely miss out on that. And what we've seen done
really well is that whenever you have a team meeting, everybody
comes together. And we use meeting room kits like Google
meet, which actually allow on a technology basis, our team to
connect and all feel like they're in one room at the same
time. But also absolute basics here, if you're working from
home, and you don't want to set up a fancy boardroom with
hardware, just make sure that you bring all of your team
together remotely using something like Google meet, or
zoom, or your video conferencing platform of choice. When you
treat all your teams as one, they are going to act like they
are one and whether that's having a water cooler chat in
your chat program of choice, whether that's doing team events
that are virtual and remote, and bring everyone together. And
we've got videos on both of those, you want to make sure
that your team feel like they're part of one team. And then
they're going to act like one team. Finally, the last mistake
that business owners make, and I think we're up to number five
now is not actually visiting your team and seeing them in the
flesh. It was nearly 10 years ago when I first visited the
Philippines and sat down with my team and shared a meal and had a
beer together. And that was a very special moment for me
because we'd been working for a couple of years remotely and
online with our team. We had, I think five or six employees
remote by that point. And it was an opportunity for me to sit
down. And all of a sudden, the walls of difference came down
between myself and my team. I feel a little emotion erasing
even even sharing that story because for me being able to
dissolve what I thought of as a remote resource, and you know,
it's a little bit inhuman to just see somebody as a remote
resource. All of those came crashing down and allowed me to
really deeply connect with my team. So if you haven't yet got
on a plane and actually met with your team in person, there is
nothing quite like giving someone a hug, sitting down over
a meal or a beer and connecting with someone on a human level.
I hope you've enjoyed these tips on building international teams.
I'm passionate about remote companies and we were running
our business completely remotely for over six years before the
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