Guide to Understand Each Other

I recently got several new long term projects for my staff, which is supposed to be a happy thing and a cause for celebration. But then, instead of being happy, I am up to my head with problems.

One thing client should understand that it may take a little while for the online employee to adjust to your policies and idiosyncrasies. An example would be, a simple excel file sent to us. But instead of receiving the information in an excel file, we received it in a notepad. Thus everything ran in a continuous form instead of breaking into bullet form. So I told my staff to just copy and paste it on Word Document and sort everything out before entering them into excel form. It turned out when the client knew of this, he was unhappy about it, because his rule is “Do Not Make Any Assumption”. If you receive something other than what I have specify in my email, then ask me first.

But the thing is, in our previous experience, there were clients whom if you ask them or  have to confirm everything before getting to work, they get pissed off. They will say, ” please think before you ask me something, if there is something wrong with the file I sent, then feel free to work on it immediately instead of trying to contact me and ask, it is a waste of time. I want you to work with minimum supervision, and that includes thinking and taking charge.” Whew! sometimes orders like that can leave you trembling, because once a mistake will be made, then you will hear them saying ” why didn’t you ask me or talk to me first?”. Really, sometimes, you just don’t know how to please them.

I have always been a thinker, anything you want me to do, I always think first, and my personality is outspoken, inquisitive and tenacious.  So one experience I had with a client was, he told me to stop thinking and asking questions and instead do exactly as how he instructed me. The thing is, he asked me to research something so I did, and it turned out along my research, there were scope and limitations to the research, which he tells me everytime I submit the research file. So instead of a week or two of research work, it turned out to be several weeks, because there’s always something to weed from the research. If  I was allowed to think and ask questions, then things would have gone smoother.

Anther client wants total silence when my agents answers his phone calls. He told me that his clients get irritated when they can hear background noise like typing or people talking and just about any sounds. Based on my experience, one time a client of another client calls up and at that time everything was quite because I was the only one working, and then the person on the other line asked me if I am working in an office, I said yes I am, and she said, but you don’t sound like an office. I guess what she was expecting were sounds of printing, typing, talking and buzzling sounds of a busy office.

There are a lot more things that I could tell, but the bottom line is, people need to understand that everybody has their own idiosyncrasies, and that adjustment takes time. A client should be patient in guiding and molding the online worker to fit his needs, policies and protocols. You have to think that before working for you, the online worker has worked for somebody else that has different rules and protocols from you.

One last example is one client may want you to place dates like 3-07-2008, another may want you to place dates like 2008-03-07 and still another may want you to do 2008-07-03.

What can I say? Different folks, really different strokes, it just rang so true.