You’ll find here the overview about my second interview with Stefan.
Stefan is a friend and fellow entrepreneur, only that he moved to Thailand to learn about and experience the 4 hour work week.
You’ll find here the overview about my second interview with Stefan.
Stefan is a friend and fellow entrepreneur, only that he moved to Thailand to learn about and experience the 4 hour work week.
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Trello is a project management online application where you can manage different tasks assigned to your virtual assistant or a team of VAs. After using other project and employee management applications and comparing them with Trello, we found it better than other applications like Asana. Using Trello is especially great if you have a flexible team of virtual assistants. This is how it looks for us:
Here are some of the major reasons why we preferred Trello over Asana.
There is no dashboard where you can see reports and ongoing work progress in Trello, but this is still possible with Trello if you follow the process in a perfect order.
So here is our best suggestions on how you can use Trello as a content management system.
Let’s suppose you’re working with only one virtual assistant at the moment.
Create two boards in Trello.
As mentioned above that you’ll move all of tasks that are supposed to be performed by your virtual assistant, he will move tasks from high priority list to Work in Process list. This will give you an overview of what tasks he is working on at the moment.
When he will finish a task, he will move it either to Pending for Validation or to your to-do list based on its status.
When you have time, you will only have to go to your board and there you will find all the tasks that are pending on your end. When you review those tasks, if the task is done you can archive that. If it’s still not complete, then you can move it back to one of your virtual assistant’s lists.
Moving tasks from one board to another is easy. You need to follow this process:
Here are some more features that we can use in order to use Trello better.
Effective outsourcing is part-4 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Click here to read part 3– Virtual assistants’ retention problems
I do agree that outsourcing is not the solution of your choice if you have tight time schedule. If you have a work that needs to be done until tomorrow, you shouldn’t outsource it.
It takes longer for someone to hire someone and train him than to do the work yourself if it’s a task which is to do within a few days.
If it’s a long term project which you have a little control over, for example, write an e-product sell it and you have a few months for that.
Then, I think, outsourcing is still a viable solution for as long as you are disciplined and quick with screening for the right assistant.
So you tell me that you need to fire people all the time, I think such an example is an extreme example. It shouldn’t happen more than two or three times.
Okay.
If it happens very often then we have a problem on a different level. If the communication is clear – the expectations is clear – I mean, there can be a misunderstanding one or two times.
The first assistant is not skilled enough, the second assistant is not motivated enough. And after those two feedback loops, your risk should be very small that an assistant is neither skilled enough nor patient enough to do your job.
If this still happens then you need to work on your communication skills, in my opinion. I propose to you if you have the next job description, whenever this is, you can work together with me and we increase the quality of your job description. And I propose some help with the interview process.
Alright. Okay.
That would be my proposition.
Yes, we can do that.
Okay. I think this whole trust building exercise is a prerequisite before we can continue to work.
So Stefan, let’s assume that we have started out with a good job description and we have found a good quality candidate with a high level of motivation and skill for the right price.
There has been a little bit of trust building in the first week where you work together. He delivers good work results in the first week and is happy with the payment
Yes.
The payment guarantee comes from oDesk. As long as he works within the guidelines in an hourly contract, he will automatically be paid.
You’re talking about hourly based.
That is correct.
And why not fixed price? You wouldn’t recommend a fixed price at all?
I have had a sub-section in my site where I discussed fixed price versus hourly pay. The bottom-line is fixed price is much more interesting to many assistants. All assistants I’ve asked prefer hourly pay because with fixed price, there is a risk. We tell them, “After you done the job, I pay you $20.” You have the freedom within the oDesk guidelines to not pay them because you say you are not happy.
So if this happens then the virtual assistant has no money. In other words, the risk is with his side. So he will often not be motivated to do the job. With the hourly pay, he will always be paid as long as he, for example, doesn’t surf on Facebook all the time and you end the contract because of that.
Well, what I don’t like about hourly pay that’s why I changed that a little bit in the past from hourly paid to, what I used in the last time, fixed price is that in the end I have absolutely no guarantee that I would have a result at all. I could pay hundreds or thousands of dollars and have nothing in the end. That is totally my risk.
Effective email communication is part-5 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Click here to read part 4 – Mastering the art of effective outsourcing
That is true. The risk is on your end. It’s more on your end and your managing skills are needed so that the money losing risk is little. So my proposition to keep that risk as little as possible is to have a clear daily communication with your assistant.
Then the risk of losing money is very small because if an assistant works 8 hours then the most you can lose is 8 hours of work where he does nothing effective until there’s the next communication exchange.
So when the initial trust has been built and the start of the work has started – hourly paid or fixed price doesn’t matter – you absolutely need daily communication. How you do it, it’s up to you. You can Skype with your assistant. You can have him write daily emails.
as an effective email communication, I prefer them on bullet point format for easy reading for me. Or, as my assistant does it right now, he makes a daily Google documents presentation with screenshots and bullet points of his questions, updates of what he works on, etc.
This is addition of checking up on your oDesk screenshots what your assistant does, will make sure that he doesn’t work for nothing for long time.
Yes, that’s true.
I agree that this is an additional time investment on your end. But if you don’t do it you, as you say, risks losing hundreds of dollars.
Yup. But the problem is that it just takes away time. Because imagine I have a new job, let’s say, a design for a flyer. Or a cover or whatever and I don’t have a specific idea of what I want.
I just want a few proposals from a graphic designer and I’m willing to pay, let’s say, $30 for that or $40. So that could translate into 10 hours of work. Or a fixed price where I have guaranteed something in the hands at the end or I don’t have anything and I don’t have to pay.
On the other hand, if I let him make some work for 10 hours and he just gives me 15 proposals but they are all crap; I have to pay him.
It’s true.
So it’s guaranteed. And most of the time as I’ve said earlier, in the past I have never had a good result in the first work batch.
Okay.
I never experienced that I give him a job, the first milestone, the first assignment and that was completely perfect 100%. That has never happened to me.
That’s also not very unrealistic.
Yes, it’s not. But I want that. I’m not going to pay 10 hours for $40 and not have my cover design done when I could have a fixed price for $40. And I’m only paying that $40 when the job is done. Not before.
Are you getting my point?
Okay, That is acceptable to me. So in this specific situation where it’s a design job, I have to say I have not much experience doing designer jobs via oDesk.
In my opinion, there are specialized services for graphics design which are much more appropriate for designer jobs than oDesk.
They’re way more expensive.
Yeah, not if you take into account the time training and hiring, etc. The least expensive method to find a basic graphic design which sometimes is surprisingly good quality is to use Fiverr.
Okay.
Do you know this service?
Yeah, I know Fiverr.
If you have Fiverr, you can invest $5 to have roughly what you want. And then you can use this in your job description to say, “Okay, I have a basic design which is like that. I want it much better.”
What to look for in a virtual assistant is part-1 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Hello, Stefan. We already talked about this subject and here are my thoughts about how to create confidence in a freshly hired assistant so that later on he can work with self motivated drive for you and what to look for in a virtual assistant at the first glance. That’s where we want to go, right?
Yes. That’s good.
Okay. In principle, it’s important at the beginning of the working relationship that your employer has no fear from you and has the room to grow self confidence in his work. If he’s afraid of being fired all the time or something then it’s difficult.
What’s also very important at the starting of a new working relationship is to figure out how big are the cultural barriers. Are there some? Where are they? How can you overcome them?
In my opinion, there’s not much of a short catch around this first trust building stage. It needs regular communication from both sides and the rough approach of “Do this work or I will fire you” often does not work in my opinion.
Please feel free to share your thoughts.
Yeah. I have experienced that when I’m trying to find someone who’s doing a good work. In the beginning, the promise is so very high.
You have a job and the employee, most of the time tells you right away that he can do this or that. And he will, in the beginning, most likely not say that he can’t do something.
Yeah, that’s natural. They need the money. That’s totally natural.
Yes. I understand that but this goes on for awhile. In my experience too long and often the whole working relationship is built along that.
But the promises are very high and the delivery is very low. And because they don’t want to get fired, as you said, they’d rather say that they can do it or they need more time or whatever.
They will come up with excuses, right?
With excuses instead of admitting that they are somewhere or that they’re not able to do it or whatever.
In my opinion, this trust building goes both ways. You added that even before the virtual assistant should have the room to work and build his own confidence; he must give the employer (so us) the confidence in his work.
So if within the first few days a virtual assistant does not deliver at all, I would be extremely careful. I would immediately let him stop working and first figure out where’s the problem.
If the problem is clearly something that he does not have the ability or the programs or anything so that he cannot do the work and that he lied to me then I would have to end the working relationship. Or, figure out a way to train him so that he still can work for me depending on the situation.
If there has been some dishonesty going on at the beginning of the working relationship from the side of the virtual assistant and, in my opinion, this happened to me personally not so often because I’m very thorough in the interview process. But if it still happens then you have to take your consequences.
In general, there are many virtual assistants out there and many of them are highly motivated and capable people. You do not need to work with people who don’t have good working ethics.
There are many other people which have good working ethics which you can find instead. So before it gets expensive and time consuming, it’s better to end a bad start than to continue and try to fix it.
Yeah but the problem is that in the beginning it’s often a good start. Then you have the impression that your worker does understand the job, has the skills and he gives you feedback.
He talks with you about the job and you are coming to a conclusion together. You’ve given him job. You tell him what he has to do in the next three days and the next week. And often, he delivers the first week whatever you wanted from him.
In my case, I don’t want my worker to deliver the job. I tell him the job and he delivers the end product.
That’s how I work. I give him a part like a partial goal first.
Yes.
Like the job is, for example, 3 weeks. I have estimated 3 weeks to finish it and I break it down to 3 parts, for example.
I think the tactics of using milestones is very effective.
So, for example, I have a job 3 weeks. I’ll tell him after I hire him, because we had a good interview, I had the impression that you understand what we’re talking about. He could do the work and he assured me he could do the work. I give him his first milestone.
In 1 week, you have to do this and that, this and that until end of the week. He tells me, “Yes I can do that. I come back to you end of the week.” Then I let him work because he can’t work when we were “Skyping” so I leave him alone to do work.
At the end of the week, he comes back to me with finished part of the job. It’s done but it’s not as I had imagined which is okay because we can work that out.
We can rearrange stuff and then finish it so that it’s perfect. But there the problem starts. Because most of the time after that he lacks the work ethic, most of the people.
If I’m not happy with the first milestone which most of the time I will never be happy because we just started working together; he will start taking longer and longer for easier parts of the job.
In other words, his efficiency drops with the time that he provides.
Dramastically, yes.
Long-distance communication with your virtual assistants is part-8 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Click here to read part 7– Why outsourcing fails?
As I’ve said before, it is very important especially at the beginning to have daily communication. Not necessarily from you to your assistant but from your assistant to you. In other words, he writes you daily emails or makes a presentation or he calls you and you take time, when you have the time, to respond to all his emails.
The most efficient way for you to talk to your assistant, in my opinion, is video recording. If you make video screen recording, you can in a very fast way, tackle a lot of different subjects without needing to explain what you’re talking about because the assistant can see what you’re talking about.
If it’s a designer job, you open your screen recording, point to what you like and what you don’t like. And as you talk, you open a new window – open Google, research something. Show how you would research and ask him to really closely review the videos and learn from that.
And while you talk about when you will be available and how is he doing and what you like and what you don’t like. At the same time you open a window, you show him stuff; you show him a tool; you show him a forum where he can research and tell him, “Open an account and asks questions there. I have made great experience with this forum, for example.”
Or at the same time you have the video running, you put an E-book for the first training into the Dropbox and tell him he can find them in the Dropbox and please review it for 3 hours. This E-book will answer all your questions.
This will keep the time you need to interact with micro-managing his work to minimum. And from all the feedback I received from my assistants, they all loved video recordings.
Okay. I don’t have the experience with how others think about video recording. But when I have video recording then I see, for example, I have a problem and I go to YouTube find the tutorial for something.
I’m very annoyed by people who are talking about something and they take 2 or 3 minutes by showing me this is a browser and you go there, and then click on it. Then you open it and you drag it to your screen and then you read it. Really stupid stuff…
Yeah. For you, it’s stupid. For someone else, it’s perhaps very useful.
But the very important stuff is only like 2 seconds and they skip it which is very nerve wrecking for me because I have to analyze what did he do, how did he do that? Because they skipped like 2 minutes and then he’s like what is he doing?
Then I go back and the very important stuff was 10 seconds and the other important stuff. So I want to prevent that from doing that myself when I’m doing, as you proposed, video recording.
Yes.
How did I “Don’t do that mistake”?
Since you don’t record a video to post to YouTube to get many views, you don’t do that for that reason.
Yes.
But you can do it. You can publish your video right after sending it to your assistant and create some content this way if you want. But you are doing the video for the sole reason of training your assistant, so do the video as it feels natural to you.
Don’t force yourself to do it a different way than you would do it naturally. But ask in the video as you talk tell him, “Whenever there’s something unclear in this video, let me know.”
Then adapt your style of video recording to whatever your assistant feedbacks to you. If for example he says, “Yeah, I know what a browser is and please don’t tell me to click on things. I will figure that out.” Then you make it easier.
If you send him a recording and, for example, you open a window and say, “Yeah, you just login to your WordPress dashboard then you show the published post and you SEO optimize them.”
Yes.
Then your assistant says, “What’s a dashboard?” Then, you know to make your video simpler. Then you say, “Yeah, you click on this URL (you do it). Then here is the login button. Here you find the dashboard. Here you find the published post. Here you find the draft post, etc.” Then, you know you had to go back and back simpler.
In my opinion, start out talking like you would talk normally and then adapt your video presentations based on the feedback of your assistant on if you make it difficult or less difficult.
If your assistant doesn’t tell you clearly, this is not understandable; you will find that out automatically if you can implement your instructions or not. If you cannot implement it then it’s clear he hasn’t understood it.
If you explain more simple than he needs it then you cannot know. Then you need his feedback and he has to tell you, “Yeah, you can make it more complicated.”
But if you repeat something 2 or 3 times then on the second video, you don’t have to explain “Here’s the dashboard from WordPress, etc.” anymore. You can just say, “Yeah, review the last video if you don’t know how to do it.” Have them keep and review the videos until they know it.
Yes.
The idea is to record one time on your end as an employer and the employee has to review the video as often as needed until they are able to ask questions or ask for clarifications or simplifications.
Your job is done once when you do 1 video. The assistant’s job is done when they have implemented the work or given you feedback that they need more instructions. Then, the next video comes.
Virtual assistants retention problems is part-3 of the second interview from Stefan from Germany, who lives the Four Hour Work Week lifestyle in Thailand.
Click here to read part 2 – Fixed price vs hourly rate
If an assistant, when he works with an oDesk, chooses to leave the job because he can’t do it or because he doesn’t have the time; he risks two things. He cannot earn more money from you. And much, much more important, he risks a bad oDesk feedback score.
You, as the employer, have the responsibility and/or the power to communicate truthfully how your virtual assistant works for you during the contract. If he stopped working for you because he didn’t do what was agreed beforehand, in my opinion, that’s justification enough for a bad feedback score.
There are several subsections in the feedback score – the quality of the work, the punctuality, the availability, the communication and stuff like that. In this case, I would give a bad feedback score in availability and say in my comment, “Well we started out with an agreement, 10 hours per week. After 1 week, they didn’t do it. I wouldn’t recommend working without a clear contract, something like that.”
Yes. I totally agree with that.
This is not to scare to the worker or to destroy his future on oDesk. If you communicate that this would be the natural consequence, this does not seem inhuman for me.
I mean, you had an agreement if they break the agreement they should expect something to happen. If you don’t take your consequences then you will continue with this working style all the time.
Also, you have to note that when someone else is applying for your job, they will check out your feedback score. They will check out what sort of feedback you leave to your workers.
And if you leave such a worker feedback one time with the back feedback score and say, “Okay. Normally, I don’t give a bad feedback score without a reason but this guy didn’t deliver on our agreement of 10 hours per week.”
Then the next person who applies to your job will be very careful because they know you will take consequences of not fulfilling the time quota.
Yes.
I think this is a mixture of being strict and honest. If it was me who would be in this situation, I would tell the assistant, “Okay, I see you deliver much less work than expected. If it’s a personal issue, please tell me. If you just lose your motivation then we need to figure a way out.”
Either they get their motivation back or we slowly fade out the work and then finish the job. And while they slowly fade out the job, they need to take notes about everything they have learned so that the training process for the next person is easier.
Okay. This is a very hard situation actually. Because when you ask your worker that you lose the motivation, that you lose the interest in the job. And he just replies to you, “Yes, I lost the interest in the job because, in my opinion, I understood it wrongly.I thought the job was easier, the job was more interesting” and whatever the personal reasons are.
He tells you, he isn’t interested in the job anymore but you have a contract; what are you going to do now? Are you just going to fire him because he made a bad decision for accepting the wrong job?
Firing is, perhaps, the wrong word. In practical situations, yes, you press the button to say end the contract. But in reality, this is open communication. You expected results, he expected some sort of work and the money. He doesn’t care seemingly about the money because the task is so not compatible to him.
He communicated that to you. So this is honest. This has to be respected. And now, we see where to continue, okay? One step would be to save the time trained into him by having him note down what he learned. That is damage control.
The second thing is you say, “Okay, thanks for communicating this. The next person I hire, I will be more clear with the communication if it’s interesting or not.” So you can have him write down what is not interesting on the job and put this as an attachment in the next job description. And say, “Review the job description. If you don’t agree to do this; if you don’t agree to do, for example, boring work…”
Or apply for what’s too difficult for them because he didn’t understand the work.
Or that. I think both of that are totally viable. As long as there’s some improvement in your hiring process then you get closer to your goal. If you try the same job description the second time, you will have the same result the second time unless you’re lucky.
Yes. So as conclusion, you gave me the idea that every time you employ someone and you face problem like at the start, you should have him or her write a new job description for you.
That is one idea. Of course, you don’t want to pay that…
And you’re going to do is take that and change your existing one. Mix it up. Create a new one that is better. And then when that happens again, you let that person create a new job description.
Yes.
So you, again that leaves a good, perfect job description.
If you want to save some time and money, you can also do a few job description increasement loops at the beginning of your job. Just hire someone to understand the job and to increase your job description quality. Communicate that so let the people convince you to keep them.
We are not; we are never forced to give out money. If you are happy with the work and want to continue the job, then continue to spend money.
If you are not happy, no one forces you to keep a contract. You can remove your credit card information whenever you want. You shouldn’t ever think that your money is to be taken for granted. You work hard for your money.
You expect hard results for your money. And if you don’t get them, be quick with damage control.
The only problem will be the job gets never done.
Well…
If you always fire the people or remove the contract, you are just running behind your project and it gets never done
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