Introduction:
At Virtual Latinos, we believe that the keys to long-term relationships with our community of VAs and our clients include having professional work ethics, transparent communication, and treating everyone we interact with, with respect. At the core of what we offer as a community, is our professional services to help our clients and their customers.

We believe that maintaining effective and timely communication with our community and clients is an integral part of the day-to-day activities we do, and directly impacts the success or failure of what we achieve. For this reason, our company has decided to define and implement additional policies in regards to how our VAs must communicate with our team and our clients when things come up in their lives, which may cause them to miss showing up to work with our clients.

New Communication Guidelines & Missed Work Policies for Agency’s VAs

This helpdesk article explains the new communication guidelines of what you need to do if you need to or plan to miss work with our clients, or when you miss work due to an emergency. It also explains the new penalties and consequences you will incur if you don’t follow these new guidelines as explained below. These new policies are being defined due to existing problems we’ve had with several VAs who missed work and did not inform our team or our clients about it. Our goal is to ensure this unprofessional behavior does not continue to occur.

Reminder about Professionalism: Remember you should always represent yourself and Virtual Latinos with professionalism, integrity and responsibility. This is why we believe these incidents should not happen, yet we are sharing them with you so you are aware of the consequences you may fall into.

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1. Communication Guidelines 

The following are the guidelines you need to follow if you’re planning on taking time off, or if an emergency occurred and you weren’t able to inform your client in advance that you’d miss work.

A) Missing Work When Planned In Advance
As you probably already know, whenever you’d like to request time off, the standard process is for you to complete the Changes & Approvals form at least 48 hours prior to missing work, and our client MUST approve such request in writing. If the client doesn’t approve, you MUST get in touch with our team right away so we can help you find a way to take the time off you need. Yet, you should not just assume that by completing the Changes & Approvals form, you’ll be automatically approved to miss work.

If for ANY reason, you’re not able to complete the Changes & Approvals form 48 hours before you need to miss work, and don’t have time to request approval from our client, you MUST still complete the form and then inform our Customer & VA Success Director by email. Ideally, we prefer that you always let our team and client know at least 24 hours in advance if anything may prevent you from showing up to work, even if our official minimum is 48 hours in advance.

B) Missing Work Due To An Emergency
If you have an emergency that causes you to miss work, we’ll know you won’t be able to inform our team and our client in advance. Yet, if this happens you MUST now inform the VL team and our client know what happened to you, or the reason you missed work within 8 hours of the occurrence of not showing up to work, or by 8am Pacific time the next day if the emergency happened after 9pm PT . This means that if you missed showing up to work completely that day, we’ll assume the occurrence/emergency to be at the time you’re supposed to start your regular workday (Such as 9am if you start your day at that time). If you worked part of the day, but then had an emergency in the middle of your day, we’ll assume the occurrence/emergency to be at the time you did not return to work.

In any of these two cases, you must find immediate access to the Internet (By phone, WiFi, coffee shop, friend, coworking space, etc) and inform our VL Customer & VA Success Director and our client immediately by email. You may also separately get in touch with our team and our client via Telegram, or other forms of communication, yet sending an email is the minimum you must do.

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2. Penalties & Warnings

If you fail to follow the communication guidelines of what you must do if you’re planning on missing work, or miss work due to an emergency as explained above, you will incur the following penalties as shown below.

FIRST OCCURRENCE

1. You will be informed by email of future penalties if these incidents continue to happen.
2.  Your payment will be postponed till the next payment period. This means the current (Following) payment period of 2 weeks will be skipped, and you’ll receive payment for your total of 4 weeks until the next payment period.

SECOND OCCURRENCE

1. You will be informed by email of future penalties if these incidents continue to happen.
2. You will be discounted the amount of $100 from your payment in the NEXT Payment Period.
   
3. You will be required to install, use and pay for a software called HubStaff, which costs $10/month.
   – This software will track your work hours, plus take and save screenshots of your computer’s monitor every few minutes during your work hour.
   – You must discount $10 from your paycheck every 4 weeks for the next 6 months, and our team will then use those $10 to pay for your subscription to HubStaff using our company’s HubStaff account.
   
4. NEW Payment schedule: You will NOW be paid every 4 weeks, NOT every 2 weeks as usual. For at least 6 months during a probation period.

THIRD OCCURRENCE

1. You will be informed by email of the future penalties if these incidents continue to happen
   
2. You will be discounted $200 from your payment in the NEXT Payment period.
   
3. You will need to continue to use and pay for HubStaff $10/month for as long as you work with our client, and not just for up to 6 months.
   
4. Payment will continue every 4 weeks, instead of every 2 weeks.
   
5. We will inform our client about this incident and will give our client the option to replace you as their VA. If the client wants to replace you, you will need to work at least 30 more days and then stop working.
   
6. If the client decides to not work with you any longer, you will be REMOVED from VL forever, and can’t apply to other/new jobs.

If you have any questions regarding this, please reach out to our Virtual Latinos’ Customer & VA Success Director – María Elisa Acero by email. You may also contact her via Telegram: @maelisaacero to help you clarify any inquiry you may have.

Thanks!

The Virtual Latinos Team

Last updated: December 15, 2021