Shifts
We require our team members to work during a “shift”. We shouldn't allow people to work only when they feel like it, since this leads to unintentional and intentional abuse. We should allow people the flexibility to set and adjust their schedule only if they have earned it. Hence, the "Don’t make me chase you" article for people who make excuses after the fact, instead of letting us know in advance before they disappear.
While the American Account Managers and team members must culturally be in tune with clients, and operate in the same time zones as clients, overseas VAs don't have to work American time zones for their shift. We do require that our VA's work shifts, of course--and even John Jonas recommends in his book “The Outsourcing Lever” to have several hours of overlapping time between American and VA schedules for coordination.
If you had a support question from your favorite company, how long would you expect to wait to get a response before you became irritated? Most companies respond within a few minutes. As you set ground rules of when to work and what shifts to take, what you will notice is that the quality of your people will start to increase, so that you will finally get the people who can actually understand the 9 Triangles, as easy as they may initially appear-- to be reliable and competent.
If people aren't logging time or are disappearing, but are still expecting to be paid for not putting in an honest day's work, then we can assume they are on unpaid leave. And following the steps in our guide, we will de-board them after a certain point.
We make sure everyone who joins the team is well-aware of these rules, in case ethically, they don't see an issue with not showing up to work or not letting us know in advance if they have a legitimate reason to ditch projects and clients. This is especially true of our managers, since if people see us slacking, they know they can, too.
Scaling a team or agency depends upon rock-solid communication, That's why Level 1 team members have to master Do, Delegate, Delete #DDD and also Communicate, Iterate, Delegate #CID in order to level up to get to level 2.