Top 10 Virtual Team-Building Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them!)
Let’s get one thing straight—you’re going to make mistakes. Developing processes that work for your unique organization and personality will take some trial and error—there are no magic pills to pop, and nothing works out of the gate. But that’s okay—mistakes are the best way to learn.
However, some mistakes are repeat offenders and can be made by both newbies and seasoned entrepreneurs.
From the thousands of e-mails I’ve received over the years from entrepreneurs struggling with outsourcing, I’ve compiled the following list of the ten most repeated mistakes. These are mistakes that can and should be avoided.
1. Mismanagement or a Lack of Willingness to Manage Your Team
Out of sight, out of mind—right? Not quite. Though you don’t see your virtual staff on a daily basis, they still have to be supervised. In fact, in the first few months, they’ll have to be managed a lot. Employee mismanagement is a mistake often made because an entrepreneur doesn’t anticipate the amount of time he or she will have to devote to keeping track of employees. After all, isn’t that why you’re outsourcing—to free up more time?
Absolutely—but you still need to do some intial leg-work. As with any new employee in a brick-and-mortar company, an outsourcer has to be trained. Whether the position is part-time or full-time, you have to integrate each person into your company and teach him or her your way of doing things.
The three principal errors business owners make in managing virtual employees are
• Not managing at all: This happens a lot with entrepreneurs who have no background in outsourcing. They think, “I’m hiring an expert. He or she should know what to do.” While that may be true, you still need to set milestones, review work, and make sure the VA isn’t experiencing any problems.
Call it syncing with your employees. It doesn’t even have to happen every day, but it does need to be done. In a physical office, supervisors normally check up on each employee’s progress during a weekly meeting. When it comes to outsourcing, you may have to do it twice or even three times a week in the beginning. Checking in doesn’t have to take a lot of time. It could be a five-minute chat every morning or night so that you can ask about your VA’s schedule for the day or request a quick progress update.
It’s also a good idea to let your virtual workers know about your availability. Tell them you are more than willing to take calls when they have problems or questions. If you don’t want to be bothered during certain parts of the day, give them a daily schedule or ask them to leave voicemails.
Be mindful of setting daily schedules if you and the outsourcer live in very different time zones. You don’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night—and neither does your VA, which could happen if time zone confusion sets in.
• Micromanaging: On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have managers who are paranoid about checking up on everything. This is typical for those who have been burned with outsourcing before and have gone off the deep end. They absolutely must know about everything.
By everything I mean detailed daily reports, hourly updates, crazy timesheets, phone calls every few minutes, and key loggers or screenshot software on the VA’s personal computer so that the micromanaging boss can snoop and spy.
It’s one thing to make sure your team members are doing their work, but it’s a whole different ballgame to request so much information that you prevent them from getting anything done. Detailed reports and timesheets take time. If it takes more than thirty minutes each day to fill these out, you’re making your team inefficient. Don’t call your VA every ten minutes to ask if he or she is done yet.
Focus on your team’s finished work unless you’ve given them jobs that must be handled on an hourly basis, such as answering the phone or providing online customer support.
Limit the time you spend checking up on your employees. A short phone call once a day or a long meeting once or twice a week is often enough to catch up. Anything beyond that takes time and costs you money. Most outsourcers, especially freelance workers, bill for the time it takes to draw up these long reports—and you’ll spend hours trying to review them all.
Key loggers and screenshot software only serve to scare your employees or give them the impression that you don’t trust them. Unfortunately, if you’re going to this extreme, you probably don’t trust your workers—and trust is a big part of success in outsourcing. This kind of mistrust is a great way to ensure that your fears will come to light: you won’t have a good VA because you’ll drive him or her away!
It’s hard to work when someone is looking over your shoulder. Honestly, I don’t understand people who hire VAs and then spend all their time snooping and checking up on them. It totally defeats the premise behind outsourcing.
• Not knowing how to manage: You’ve probably heard the saying, “Managers can be good employees, but not all employees can be good managers.” You can be very good at your job, but that doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be a good manager. Believe it or not, the vast majority of business owners whom I’ve come into contact with say that they started out as pretty terrible managers—myself included.
Most entrepreneurs were employees themselves with zero experience in supervision, or freelancers who suddenly felt the need to expand when they started getting more work. If this is your first time being the boss, expect to make some mistakes—because you’ll be making a lot of them. Learn to forgive yourself for your mistakes and turn them into opportunities to learn. This level of self-awareness will strengthen your managerial skills over time. Being a good manager doesn’t happen overnight.
Keep in mind that each person you manage is different—and that he or she is different from you. Do not expect your VA to act the same way you do.
Finally, remember that being a manager or a supervisor is a job. It takes time, a lot of work, and sometimes more education to get better. If you find yourself needing help, ask for it. Leave your ego at the door—remember what I said about self-awareness?—and ask for help from other business owners in similar positions.
2. Choosing the Wrong Location
When it comes to outsourcing, a lot of your success depends on location, location, location. A mistake in location can often lead to a lot of lost time and money. In the Philippines, for example, traditional business tasks such as transcription work or data entry can be sent to outsourcers in provinces or smaller cities. Labor is cheaper in these places, but the people often do not have a lot of experience, so you can expect some errors. Nontraditional BPO (business-process outsourcing) or KPO (knowledge-process outsourcing) work should be sent to places with better facilities and more experienced and knowledgeable workers. These are usually major cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas, such as—in the case of the Philippines—Manila, Davao, or Cebu.
3. Failing to Analyze Your Virtual Staffing Needs
Once entrepreneurs realize how much time and money they can save by delegating work to virtual staff, they sometimes get outsource-happy and begin outsourcing everything and anything that lands on their desks. Others may want to outsource but become paralyzed before they begin—they don’t know what or how to outsource, and they cannot bear to delegate any work.
Before you outsource a task or project, analyze whether or not it is something that could be handled best by your local staff, yourself, or a virtual worker. Not everything is suitable to assign to a virtual employee—a perfect example is anything related to the written word. Though your local staff is paid more, will they be able to produce a higher-quality document with fewer grammatical errors than an overseas worker? If so, it might be worthwhile to have your local team handle it so that you don’t have to spend so much time or money correcting the work.
Many entrepreneurs outsource tasks simply because they don’t want to do them—even when the tasks are something they can or should only do themselves. Doing this can unnecessarily double the size of your staff, costing you money, not to mention it being detrimental to your business, if you end up outsourcing the wrong tasks or roles.
If something does need to be outsourced, it’s important to break the project down into manageable tasks so that you can track it easily and figure out if you need to send it to one VA or to a team.
Go back to your 3 Lists to Freedom here and use them as a guide to see exactly what you needed or wanted to outsource in the first place. This will help you figure out what type of worker should handle the task for you.
4. Following the Wrong Outsourcing Model
It’s easy to find get-rich-quick formulas that promote one-size-fits-all programs for outsourcing. But not all businesses are the same. They are different sizes and have different markets, different budgets, and wildly different needs. If you want to find an assistant to do affiliate marketing, you obviously won’t buy a book detailing how some Fortune 100 company succeeded in outsourcing management-level work. Likewise, if you’re an architectural firm, it won’t do you any good to buy a program that only tells you how to hire a VA to set up WordPress sites. Your outsourcing model needs to fit you like a glove. Finding the right fit takes a lot of work—and many people give up when faced with hard work.
Another problem with some of the outsourcing advice out there is that some of it paints an incomplete picture of how to outsource, stopping after describing the hiring process or only showing you how to train your new team.
Outsourcing is a very powerful tool, but you need to know how to use it. To do this, you need to step back and learn more about your business, the type of outsourcing model that best suits you and your business, as well as the initial setup of the outsourcing process (as I’ve outlined in Sections 1 to 3).
To find the right outsourcing model, you need to get down into the trenches. Talk to other people who are already using virtual workers. You can do this by searching for groups on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn that focus on outsourcing and working with virtual staff. Ask how they’re implementing their virtual teams. Get educated, and most of all, be willing to put in the work.
5. Inadequate Compensation (Also Known as Being a Tight-Ass!)
Lately, the term “outsourcing” seems to be synonymous with the word “cheap”—as in, cheap labor, cheap overhead costs, cheap benefits, and ultimately, cheap products. This is something I’m hoping to change. Outsourcing certainly isn’t cheap, but it is cost-effective—and that includes salaries for your virtual assistants. Besides, people who are called cheap are seldom happy, and neither are their workers—and an unhappy worker will always do a poor job.
Compensation that both you and your employee feel is fair can be a hard balance to strike. People rarely think they’re getting paid fairly—otherwise those bigwigs from mega-corporations wouldn’t expect $1,000,000 bonuses on top of their bazillion-dollar salaries. My definition of fair compensation is something higher than market price but lower than what you would pay the outsourcer’s counterpart at home.
When you consider that some offshore VAs routinely get paid 150 percent less than their onshore counterparts, it becomes clear that you’ll have to depend on the experience level of the VA, to determine how low you can go. Many Internet marketing “guru” types love to sell the idea of paying a VA $250 a month to handle all the drudge work. While that idea might seem tempting, it isn’t always the case, and most of the time they say these things to get you excited about the concept of outsourcing so that you end up buying their revolutionary online product. Be realistic—what type of quality is someone going to bring to your business if you’re paying them $1.56 per hour?
As I’ve mentioned countless times in interviews and at speaking engagements, adequate compensation is determined by the virtual worker’s experience, location, and market prices—and as demand for virtual staffing increases, salaries are changing quite a bit.
For up-to-date information on Filipino salaries, you can head to the regularly updated guide to paying Filipino VAs on my blog at ChrisDucker.com/VAPay
If you are hiring outsourcers who have no experience, you should use the local markets that they are based in to determine their rates. However, if you’re hiring experienced outsourcers who have done online and offline work, you’ll need to be ready to pay them based on their experience level, their expectations for the job, and where their experience falls in the range of acceptable salaries for their positions.
One of the simplest ways to build a team you can trust is to pay your VAs fair prices that take into account what they want to receive, market norms, and what you’re comfortable paying. Make an attractive offer that is considerate and reasonable to you and your staff.
If you can only afford so much, find another perk to offer, such as the opportunity to advance, paid vacation time, free products, commission bonuses, or scheduled raises. If you’re a coach or offer another relevant service, you could even offer employees some of your time in exchange for their work.
6. Inability to Recognize the Outsourced Site’s Culture
After picking the right location, it is absolutely critical that you get to know the people who work there. While a VA is expected to adapt to his or her employer’s culture, there are always a few things you cannot change. This includes work ethic, time constraints, the VA’s social status, certain language quirks, and his or her overall attitude. Ask your staff for a few tourism websites that showcase the culture side of their country, if you’re working with people outside of your own domain. It’ll help you get on the same page as them.
For example, Southeast Asians tend to be rather shy and very polite. Their language includes designations for big brother, boss, and professional. They have a clear social structure that teaches them to respect their elders. If you put people with these qualities on the collections department of a credit card company where they’ll have to address everyone by first name and be rude to late-paying customers, it’s going to take them a while adapt. I’m not saying it’s impossible because it’s being done—but it will take some training. Likewise, if your VA comes from a background where people do not speak unless spoken to, you might take his or her silence in meetings as a lack of initiative or imagination.
Adapting to a culture goes both ways, and you need to give as much importance to your virtual worker’s culture as he or she is expected to give to yours. Respect your differences. That may seem like common sense, but it’s a problem that routinely frustrates entrepreneurs. They expect offshore freelancers to act like them, and they alienate their team members instead of accepting each worker’s differences.
The key to building a cohesive remote team is to recognize your employee’s differences and to embrace them.
7. Lack of Proper Structure and Communication
If you have a manager who doesn’t want to manage, a team of people who all work different hours with no knowledge of what the others are doing, and no system for communication, you’re setting yourself up for an outsourcing failure. Virtual teams need a lot of stability and structure. They need set protocols and contingency plans to back them up. This is one of the main reasons that I suggest having a GVA or project manager create a regularly updated operations manual. If someone leaves, you’ll have a rundown of what the worker did on a daily basis along with any processes that he or she followed.
Some entrepreneurs find this to be too rigid and think it chokes creativity. On the contrary, structure can boost creativity. For example, having set brainstorming or watering hole hours lets your staff know that ideas are encouraged and even expected and prompts a steady flow of innovation.
Communicating is the hardest part of virtual working. You need to invest in a collaborative platform (such as one of the project-management systems we discussed earlier like Basecamp or Asana) that works for you and your team. If you find one that works well but costs money, do not cut corners—buy it. Also expect that anything that takes one hour to work on face-to-face will likely take twice as long when working with people on the phone. It could take even more time if you’re talking to four people on a conference call.
Good communication involves more than having the right technology or structure. If your VAs are overseas, culture plays a part, too. They might have their own ways of saying things or certain taboos, so I suggest doing some Internet research to get up to speed with what their culture is all about.
You and your team need to do some groundwork to find that groove. Once you do, the distance won’t make a difference.
8. Reluctance to Adapt to a Virtual Work Environment
When you work with remote workers, you’ll start to rely heavily on technology and become dependent on the fast pace of the Internet. For traditionalists who are set in their ways, it’s easy to get left behind. You’ll need to invest a certain amount in training for your team and perhaps in new software. While it’s no longer unusual to hire a VA who is in his or her forties or an Internet marketer in his or her twenties, some entrepreneurs still find it difficult to accept this fact.
A fifty-year old dry-cleaning business owner may be unreceptive to the ideas that a twenty-three-year-old SEO specialist has to offer, based solely on the SEO VA’s age. Likewise, a twenty-four-year-old Internet marketer might be dismissive of a thirty-seven-year-old VA’s advice on managing online files—even if the older worker does have fifteen years of offline and online experience as an executive assistant.
Prejudices like these will only hold you back. The only thing constant on the Internet is change, and that happens quickly. You either have to keep up or get washed out. This is the new way of doing business—or, as I sometimes call it, the virtual business lifestyle.
9. Underutilizing Virtual Talent
While a lot of entrepreneurs work hard to make sure their online businesses are sustainable in the long term, they don’t always think about their staff members in the same way. Some entrepreneurs view their VAs as temps or as a cheap way to staff the company during its startup phase. Once the business gets bigger, the entrepreneur intends to rent an office and grow the company by employing a full-time office-based staff. For this reason, he or she doesn’t give much care to training or managing VAs.
Other entrepreneurs allow their businesses to become top-heavy. They keep promoting themselves and hiring from outside to fill the management ranks despite the fact that their entry-level workers have the qualifications to advance. They simply forget that they can promote their virtual workers, too.
Then there are the business owners who overlook their VAs’ abilities entirely because they have a fundamental bias against anyone with a developing-world education, thinking they couldn’t possibly match someone with a Western diploma. As misguided as this prejudice is, it’s not at all uncommon.
You should never pick your staff based solely on what they can do now. Instead, imagine what they can contribute to your company’s growth in the future. Underutilizing virtual talent is a common and costly mistake. An outsourcer, like any employee, can get bored and leave in search of more challenging work.
When you don’t recognize your VA’s skills at all, he or she will feel undervalued and detached from the company. If you do not think of your team members as important parts of your company, they won’t think your company is important either. This often results in poor employee performance or the employee leaving altogether.
Remember, the battle to staff and grow a productive team is won by preventing attrition and learning how to retain and manage your outsourcers. Recruitment and training take time and a lot of money. Instead of looking at your virtual employees in the short term, extend your vision by including them in your company’s growth. Nurture each worker’s potential and involve him or her as much as you can.
10. Attempting to Outsource Your Understanding
When we say you can outsource everything, that doesn’t mean that an outsourcer can take the place of your expertise or knowledge in running your businesses. There are many fly-by-night entrepreneurs out there who read books, pick niches, and decide to become overnight experts on topics they have zero experience in and aren’t qualified to talk about. Although they might make a little money, it’s easy to see that these types of people don’t last very long in the business world.
Likewise, some entrepreneurs outsource parts of their business that they don’t understand at all and rely 100 percent on the knowledge of their virtual teams. You may not need to know how to do everything in your business, but you do need to know why it’s important or at least have an understanding of how it’s done. For example, while you may not necessarily need to know how to build a website using WordPress, you do need to understand why you should build a site using this platform instead of using Drupal or Joomla.
In order for you to effectively run your growing virtual company, you need to learn its nuts and bolts. You cannot fake your way into becoming an expert. You may be able to hire a team of virtual assistants to position you as an expert in your niche or a programmer to build you a site that makes you look legitimate, but you still need to manage your company. You cannot do that unless you know exactly what it is you are doing.
If you want to explore a certain industry, then take the time to learn about it—and then you can hire someone to help position you in the niche. Your credibility will not lie on your staff. It lies solely on you. If you don’t know anything about a particular aspect of your business, you can have your team members explain it to you. Ask them why it is needed or why it is important. A really good virtual assistant will be able to give you a step-by-step explanation of why implementing a program or a design is crucial to your business. He or she should also explain how the new program or design will impact your potential growth.
To wrap up, let’s recap a couple of key points. First and foremost, every company is unique. Because of this, it’s important to spend time figuring out what you should and should not be outsourcing in the first place. Once you’ve done that, it pays to figure out to whom you should be outsourcing the work. Is this a job for a domestically based employee or freelancer, or is it something you can pass onto your overseas VA?
The aim of outsourcing isn’t to simply offload work. It’s about building an efficient, lean business that’s managed with a smart attitude and a clear focus toward gaining you—the owner—as much freedom as possible to run and grow your company.