Okay, so our first step that we're going to cover on
managing remote teams fundamental shift with going
from having just a local team, to having some international
team members and that's probably the shift you'll start with,
you'll probably start with going hybrid. And it's unlikely you'll
jump into going completely remote. Although some of you
guys if you're a bit radical, you might, the fundamental shift
that I think is the most important is to treat your team
as if they were a local team, I have access to observing many
different business owners, who will say, hey, I've got my
Sydney team, or I've got my Australian team. And then I have
the Philippines team. Or then I have the VA pays. Or then I have
like, you know, this one VA who does like back office
processing, I really disagree with even wording it that way.
But I think it's you know, it's the intention behind it. If your
mindset and your mentality is that you have an Australian
team, and then you have like some back office processing
being done in the Philippines, that's not really a team that's
outsourcing or that's process outsourcing. And so I want you
to think about your team, as an actual team, no matter where
their location is, you know, someone is working from home, or
from an office or from a different location. And they
just happened to be in a different country. But the most
important thing here guys is that when you hire and recruit
this team, that you treat them as actual team members. Now, not
only is that going to build a better culture overall, but if
you think about the personal motivation of your team, if I
said to Regina, hey, like, you know, you're my You're my VA,
you're just you're just here to do VA work, but you're not
really part of the you know, you're not really part of it
genius, you're just the VA Have a think about how her
motivation, or her engagement with the company might be on a
human level on a human level of actually working with us. So
that's my, that's my hot tip number one is making sure that
you're building out the team, and everyone actually feels like
team. So what does that mean? Well, that means that you have
to have some way of doing your Friday night drinks as a team,
it means that when you're doing your weekly team meeting,
everyone is dialed in, it means that when you're doing your
training and your onboarding, you don't have like a separate
session for your Australian team and a separate session for your
international team members, you do it with everyone together.
And there's a few hurdles that you have to jump through with
that it means that Oh, now we have to you know, we always have
to do it via Hangout, or we always have to do it in a group
setting. And you've got to be really careful, especially if
you have an office, you might not be in there right now. But
you have to be really careful about having like side
conversations with staff that are locally accessible, that you
may not keep your international team informed about. So these
are some of the like, you know, day one first steps going from
moving around to crawling and from crawling to walking, that
you need to get right to not alienate your remote team rage,
maybe you can speak to that a little bit, you know, maybe on
the team, you know the difference between them feeling
like vas versus feeling like part of a company? Because I
think that's a big thing. How do you how do you handle that? And
what are your thoughts around that?
Oh, especially in the Philippines feed BPO is very big
in Philippines. So you need to when during the hiring process
during the interview process, I think what's the take note in
there he set expectations? Is this job for is for a long term?
Or is this job is for a part time or just for a short term?
And then yeah, it will help managing expectation of that
applicant or of that future employee? Are they gonna do
their job? Well, because if you guys set proper expectations, it
will help and inspire them, oh, I have these these are their
future plans for me. I can get more I can give more to this
company. And I can also have more and learn a lot from this
company can grow more because nowadays future freelancers or
online job applicants are more into like long term than short
term.
Yeah. And basically employees cruising between contracts with
different companies and you know, like they're always
chasing the next contract that'll pay them a little bit
more or they're, you know, working for two or three people
at the same time. And all of those things just they don't
work. If you want to have a functioning remote team that's
going to be with you for a long time because you just can't have
you know, you can't onboard someone and then have them
disappear after a couple of months. Like it's just not
sustainable. Yeah. And it's
more expensive, actually online. training people again and again,
then yeah,
so why don't jump into a hiring hiring process now and Ridge,
I'd like to cover off some job ad examples. And so maybe you
might like to bring up a couple of those in the background while
I'm talking about that. So when we hire the job site that we use
the most is online. jobs.ph. If you are first starting out with
your first one, two or three staff in an international team,
especially in the Philippines, I'd recommend you probably go
with an agency it's going to be nearly twice the price of hiring
some directly, but they just kind of take care of all the HR,
the onboarding, the training, they're going to train them how
to work with Australian businesses and all those kind of
things. However, if your game, you can absolutely go ahead and
hire directly, we're going to show you how we're doing that,
because that's what we do these days, about half of our staff
come from referrals from other team members. And we give I
think it's a two or $300 bonus, if someone refers a friend, and
then they stay for six months, they get a, they get a bonus
payment, which is a nice little payment. The other half of
people that we hire typically get from this website, online
jobs.ph. There's a number of other job websites for online
workers in the Philippines. But this is the one that we've had
the most luck from, it's been fairly consistent, which is
pretty cool. Now, there are other options like Upwork, and
Freelancer stay the hell away from those, they're good for
contract work, like if you want a video editor to just work for
you like by the hour, but if you want a full time staff member,
and we're paying everyone full time salaries, where you know,
with benefits and everything else, I'm going to go through
the benefits and what we do, but just stay away from those
contracting and VA sites, because that's where the
provisional VA is hanging out, you're looking for someone who
wants a career and the staff members read and I'd love some
extra thoughts on this from from you in a second, the staff
members that have done really, really well with us, or those
that have come from a corporate background. So either like a
management position of some sort, in a call center or in in
some other corporate, and many of them are actually working
from home for the first time, many of them have been going to
an office, and we need to kind of do a bit of teaching on
teaching them to work from home, I would rather teach someone to
work from home, then then try and have them unlearn being a
VA, you know, being a professional VA, because that's,
you know, just impossible. Basically, Reggie, you want to
share a little bit about the criteria of the people that you
look for when you're hiring?
Sure. One of the things that we do when we look at employees who
apply for our job boards is that look at the resume and see how
many years are they staying in certain companies? Very easy.
Yeah. But it doesn't mean guys that if they have like, if they
should stay short term in certain companies, that they're
not really free for your company for a long term. So maybe just
ask why? Because there are also certain reasons that, you know,
they say their charter, but yeah, molissa our employees that
really also stay with us in average for two to three years
have been with our company also longer and as what Pete said,
they're like, in the position where it's super visor
managerial. So they have a lot of experience already in the in
big companies. And then they're in office, like they want to
work at home and avoid traffic and those, you know, avoid
pollution and those kind of such and so, and then they also want
to, you know, be career oriented, also like, but also
still be with family also,
I think like that's it's even more so than Australia because
like everyone everyone looks at like how long you've been, you
know, and if you're in a different job in every six
months, they'll see that on the resume. But Filipinos in
particular, like if you're a career person, like you'll be
there five or six years, like super loyal and we don't and we
don't even say that with with Australia, especially young
people. I mean, we're primarily hiring young people, the age
group that we hire, I would say rages like 28 to 35. Would that
be a bad moment?
Yeah, yeah, that's insane. Early 30s.
Yeah, that's like, it's a good, it's a good age, because like
young and dynamic, and tech savvy, but also they've probably
done a few years in, in corporate and also they're
probably or they may already have like a, you know, a young
family. And that means that, you know, they've got a partner,
they're married, they're kind of like the Filipino version of
settles, which is like, you know, you've got your partner
and you're set. And so then it's like, okay, you know, they're
just happy to be in a good fulfilling job in a good
workplace and want to continue to further their career with a
good company. And you know, it's so important what you said read
about, they want to grow and they want to be a part of, you
know, a good company, they don't actually want to float around.
One thing that I need to either beat is that most of these
employees are moving at work at home, aside from like, traffic
issues, is that in the office base employment, there's like,
very toxic, yeah, that toxic in the office. So that's lesser in
terms in working at home?
Yeah, totally. I'd say a part of that is probably the dynamic of
a small business versus a large corporate and BPO is especially
right you've got like 1000s or 10s of 1000s of people. And this
Yeah, there's there's other cultural things with that, how
that translates to workers that you want to hire.