Best Way to Communicate with Remote Employees

Okay. So, there is lots of ways you communicate these days with your remote employees. Email, Skype, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. There is so many choices and so many ways to do it. Now, when you're first, initially starting to interview an online employee for a job, you're most likely going to be communicating to them via email.

The emails fine but is not in the most efficient way to actually communicate. What's your staff? And I'm going to tell you. What I actually use. I use a program called Discord. This is absolutely free to use. It's actually best way to describe it is it's like Slack for gamers. So Slack, is a paid for app. If you've got it and your company or you use it, then keep using it is almost the same. Slack is a business class application. It costs money and it starts to ramp up quite a bit as more employees and staff yard. Whereas Discord, you can add as many people as you want. It doesn't cost you anything extra. It's free. The only thing about Discord is that as aimed at gamers, so when you initially load up.

It's got some games and stuff like that screen to show you. But what I've found is that ignore all that set up, your channels set up all your different ways of speaking, your groups and so on. Invite your Filipino staff and then you can start communicating in real time. Now, the good thing about it is that yes, is a time deference, depending on which part of the world you're hiring people from the Philippines, if you are from Australia, then Australia, New Zealand's, but good luck you because.

You're pretty much in the similar time zone, so there's only a couple of hours a difference. If you're from the UK you're looking at about a 8 hour deference. Spain where I'm in, it's seven hours just now. It does change during summertime because we have British summertime, whereas Filipinos don't.

Their Clocks stays the same, so it will change by one hour forward. So you'll get closer to them by one hour. If you're in America, a lot of your Filipinos, if they're doing a day time shift, they're effectively working through the middle of the night. Again, depending on which part of America you in, and so it's not so much realtime unless you're hiring someone who's going to work a graveyard shift, in the Philippines for you.

I don't highly recommend that at all. Um, if you can get away with your staff working, depending obviously what they're doing, if you can get them working away in a time zone or a time period, that's more natural to them, be it day time, afternoon or evening, then you're going to get better work from them. If you're making people work through the night, then generally speaking.

The younger people. Okay. Fine, they can cope with that can a job for several years before going crazy, but older people with family, especially if they were young kids really can't cope with that job over us over a long period of time. Or at least that's the feedback I've been hearing about it.

Yep. Some people love the graveyard shift. But most people are not nightowls they like to work during the day, because they want to spend, you know, evenings or weekends with family and friends.

So anyway, Discord. So the good thing about Discord is that as a thought comes to your head, you can go on your computer, type it in, send it off to your Filipino staff.

You can use it on your mobile, on your iPad and so on. They can also use it on their mobile, on their computer. And so on. And it's a great way for, especially if youes are got a couple of hours together during the day or whatever. You can talk to each other in real time, so you can pass information back and forth.

You can get them. One of the things I do is that we have general chat staff, so we have an off topic for just sort of fun and hanging out. Can I call it the office cooler, chat? But basically the idea behind that is the, it's just not all work all the time because the are people are real people. You know, it's like, it's so easy to treat someone who's at the other side of a screen as like some sort of robot, some sort of AI that does things for you because you never get to meet their VAs in person.

I plan to do that this year. It actually is going to get to meet everybody all see what's going on with this whole C*****v**us thing oops shouldn't have said that now, YouTube is not going to like the video. So in Discord, one of the things that you can do. Is a set up different channels. So I set up private channels for each of the staff where I communicate directly with them and they communicate directly with me if anyone's seen it.

We also have some combined channels. So, if for example, several of my staff are working on a similar project. I put them all on a combined channel so that way they can see what's going on with each other and understand what work's getting done. So what I do is every member of staff, at the end of the day.

Posts a short post saying, here's what you've done today. This is what I've done. So for example, the video editors who are doing this video, will post up and that he has edited this video and it's now ready to go as an example, right? So that's an easy, straightforward, easy to do post. Some of the VA's have more, I'll have different tasks to do during the day, so they'll just list off the tasks that they've done and what they're planning to do the next day they're working.

Now the reason I get into this, tell me what they're planning to do in the next day. They're working. Is that this will allow me to look at it and go, well, I don't want you working on that. I want you working on this. Say working on something different or whatever. But generally speaking, they usually are following a pattern of what I'm expecting them to work on.

So I know what's actually happening in advance, because that's generally set. The week or month in advance is generally set what you're doing. Some jobs are just the same kind of job over and over and over. So it's, there's nothing to set. You just, you know, all you're expecting to see us. Oh, that was done today.

This is the progress we are at. Here is what's getting done tomorrow, and it's just a quick oversight. It's a good way of seeing what's going on because remember, you're not in the office with the other staff. They're all working remotely. I actually do this same process with my other staff in Spain and other staff in the UK.

We all just. Put in a quick brief overview, it gives me an insight of what's going on. So for example, back in Glasgow, I've got an office in Scotland and staff their let me know how many incoming calls, how many outgoing calls they done, how many emails they received that day, how many emails out they done and so on.

And this just gives me a breif overview of what's going on. So I can keep an eye on things that I would. You know, I would be aware of, if, I was sitting in the office, but because I'm not, I want to still be aware of them, but it gives me that chance to say, right. We'll actually, we should maybe put more resources towards X, Y, and Z depending on what comes in.

So yeah. So Discord , I'll put the link in the description below. Completely free program if you've never used it before. There's plenty of tutorials on YouTube on how to set up a Discord server and what actually happens. It's fairly easy to secure it and only people who you invite. Get into the channels that you've put up the invite link for and so on.

You can set, settings for staff, so certain people can see only certain channels or have on the ability to see or interact with certain people or certain things. It's entirely up to you. You know, there's a small curve of understanding to get up and running with it but, it isn't that hard. And like I said, there are videos on YouTube.

They explain how to do that. I mean if people really wanted me to go into a video of how I set up Discord for my Filipino staff to use. Then I'm quite happy to do that at some point. Show you some examples of what I actually do, but yeah, so best way communicate, get Discord. It's free, it's easy to use.

Everybody can get access to it. It's got a voice and video capability for sharing screens and so on. So there's, you know, you can upload images, Pictures, documents, PDFs, all sorts of things can get shared with it. So I highly recommend if you've got the money, or if you're already using it, Slack, a lot of times stuff that you can use.

I don't personally use it just simply because I've been using discord now for think it's close on six years, five years, whenever it came out. I literally use it from that point because quite a lot of my gaming buddies actually use that as well, and it was something that we moved that way from TeamSpeak and onto Discord.

I think everybody had done that, so yeah, check that out. So if you do like these kind of videos, please give me a like, if you've not already done so subscribe to the channel, it lets me know that. People are actually interested in these videos. Share it if you can. If you've got any friends who would be interested in finding out more of what it's like to hire people from the Philippines, what you have to do, then that would be really great and really helpful for the channel.

And I'll see you in the next video. Bye.