Sharing the biggest challenges we’ve experienced working with our Philippines remote team over 5 years.
We’ve had our share of success and challenges throughout our going remote journey. Now we want to share the biggest challenges we encountered to help you prepare for the changes while you transition to remote work.
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Transcription:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, Peter Moriarty here. Great to have you here for a another live session. This morning, we are covering the biggest challenges we’ve faced with growing and scaling our team in the Philippines. We’ve been hiring and running a remote team in the Philippines for about five, six years now. No, even more, probably six or seven years, actually. I’m going to be share all of the challenges that we’ve faced along the way and take you guys through those. So if you’re listening in live, please say, hello, pop your questions below. I like to keep this nice and interactive. I would love to hear what challenges you’ve had or if there are particular things that you’d like to know from me, how I’ve taken care of particular issues that have come up, then I’ll take you through it.
Let’s jump right into it. I’m going to take you through what are all the challenges that we’ve been through. The first thing to start out with when you’re hiring an international team is obviously the differences in culture. I started an Australian business. When we first started hiring in Australia. What we found was that it was pretty easy to connect with our team members. For me, personally, as an employer, connect with my staff on a cultural level, because we’re in the same place, it was kind of like you’re playing on home turf and, we’d play by the rules of Sydney. That was kind of the way that things would be done.
Now, when we began to hire off shore and in different locations, what we found was as someone was working remotely and they were actually working in their home country, they were very much embedded in their own culture and that was really a big learning curve for us, because we had to learn how to work with someone who was very, very different. I had to learn how to work with people who are very different to me. And what I found there was you have this meshing of the two different cultures, particularly with Australian and Philippines cultures. There’s a few areas, I wouldn’t really say we butt heads, but there’s a few areas where there are just dynamics between those two cultures that need consideration and care to make sure that things run swimmingly.
One of those that’s really important is the culture of speaking up. In Australia, we’re quite forward. Aussies are quite forward. We’re happy to say what we like, we have this Larrikin culture, a subtle, but really overt, borderline racism that’s just built into who we are and we’re very happy to be outspoken, and I would say, brash or rash. That’s just the way that Australians tend to be. Yet in Filipino culture, it’s a lot more of, I wouldn’t say subservient. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but a much more reserved, polite, non forthcoming culture.
Part of that has to do with the history of the Spaniards, been there for hundreds of years, and part of that is just how the culture has developed. Australia is a religious country, but Philippines is hardcore Catholic so there’s that influence there as well. But the culture of much stronger family ties, which is also different to what we have here. We’re really happy to throw our oldies in a nursing home, and as soon as you’re 20 years old, you’re out of the house. Whereas in the Philippines, Filipinos will stay with their families for a long time sometimes until they get married, but not always necessarily. It’s more keeping the family together is the most important goal.
And so supporting brothers and sisters, in a family, if you’re the sibling who has a job, you may be paying for your other siblings’ education. You’ll definitely be helping the parents as they age out with their care. So that culture is very different to what we experienced here. So where that comes into the workplace is, if you have a situation where there’s a problem, or there’s an issue you may expect as we would, someone who’s Australian to say, “Hey, that thing’s fucked and we need to speak up about it.”
We’re very vocal in bringing up when there’s issues and being happy to actually share that. Whereas with team members, particularly Filipinos, they’re much less likely to actually speak up about something. That’s probably the number one. Speaking up about things. So we have to go through a real process of training our team to have the confidence and creating that safe space. So they have the confidence to be able to speak up when something’s not right or speak up when something needs to be changed, because there’s very much culture at times of just following the program, just following the system or just following the status quo without questioning it, without questioning the boss or the leaders.
Now, part of that is also the corporate culture. A lot of the team members that we hire come from an ex call center background, and so they’ve worked for a very large organization where again, you don’t really have a voice or you don’t feel like you have a voice. And so the individual things that you do on a daily basis, don’t really have a massive, measurable impact on the organization at large. So one of the things that we have to work on as a small business is creating that space where team members can actually understand that they have the opportunity to help direct the direction of the business.
Now we’re not a small business anymore. We’re transitioning to that mid market type company. We’ve got 35 people and that size of business. Yes, it has silos. Yes it has management structure. Yes we need to really do a lot of work for people to feel like they can actually move the needle on the business. If you can create that safe space, then your team will really be able to flourish. Now, I’m assuming if you’re watching this video and if you’re watching at content, you’re probably in the earlier stage of building that remote team, maybe you got two people, maybe you got five people, maybe you got 10. Maybe you’re just starting out and that’s totally fine, wherever you are.
So in the early stages of growing your team, it’s really important that the team are involved in the business. Now, what are some ways that you can do that? Well, some of the ways that we do that is we involve our team in all of the planning of our business. So any strategic planning, any quarterly planning that we do when we’re thinking about, well, what do we want to achieve in the next year? We focus on making sure that the team all have a voice in what we do strategically. That’s really important because I want to make sure that everyone on the team feels like they are participating in the direction of the business. No one wants to work for a company where they feel like they’re not having an impact or they’re feeling like their individual contribution doesn’t actually matter.
We have some people who’ve joined us, Chris and Dave, thanks very much for coming along. Make sure you post your questions below on the stream and I’ll be happy to help you out with those. That’s the biggest culture there. Now let’s talk about how Australians contribute to that culture with us being strong, and I’ve noticed this in my management style. When we are directive and we are strong, we exacerbate our team members, not wanting to speak up or our Filipino team members, not wanting to speak up, speak up.
Where I’ve noticed that coming up for me is, in our small business, every single customer of ours is important. We have 1500 customers, but I know that any one of those businesses who ceases to do business with us is going to hurt us financially. So I never want to lose a single customer ever period. Now, when we have a customer who has an issue, I don’t fly off the handle, but I get upset. Is it personal up front? I’m the CEO, I’m the founder, my name’s on the door right? And so I am strong when we have that kind of issue come up in a business and because I’m strong with that as an issue, the team go, “Oh, Pete doesn’t like when we have customer issues.” And so there is a propensity to let’s hide customer issues, and then Pete won’t get angry.
So can you see how that dynamic plays out? So that definitely becomes a challenge, and that’s one of the ways where it’s really shown up for us. So what is the solution creating safe space, where when someone raises a red flag or when someone speaks up about something? It’s celebrated. Thank you for bringing that up. Thank you for sharing that that’s an issue. Thank you for letting us know about that. Let’s work on that. Let’s work on solving the problem together and making sure that that’s really safe for everyone.
The other part of where this cultural element becomes challenging to manage is the VA culture, and the VA culture is, if you think about everyone, read The 4-Hour Workweek from Tim Ferris and decided to go and get themselves a VA right? I don’t like that term, but everyone went and got themselves a VA and sites like freelancer.com and Upwork got flooded with, job postings for VAs and western businesses who wanted to hire those in developing countries, primarily as VAs.
Now there’s a whole industry of Filipinos who will work from home and be VA’s. Some of them, I would even call professional Vas, and that’s a negative term. What I mean by that is there is a culture of floating between different employers and when team members or well VAs, we’ll call them because we don’t hire these guys. When they float between different employers, they’re not necessarily engaged in any particular role, they’re back and forward between different jobs, with different people. Sometimes they’re even moonlighting, we call it, which means they’re working for more than one employer at the same time. Some employers will use command and control type strategies with tracking what people are doing on their computers, and so what they’ll do is they’ll have two laptops there and they’ll just, these professional VAs will move the mouse or, punch some keys on the keyboard on each one of those for hours on end. So it looks like they’re active.
That culture has been created. Number one, because a lot of them have been mistreated by overseas employers. And I blame the United States for that. Starting the culture of hiring into the Philippines because they were first before Australia, New Zealand and other APEC countries started hiring into that. But what’s happened is there’s this dynamic of the employer, not really caring about the employee, seeing them as someone who is either a number or is someone who is disposable. And that is an easy trap to fall into when you have a large divide in the economy and the pay that you’re paying someone. The feelings of superiority and all these other stuff comes up, right? But there’s this undertone which can arise if this person is disposable because I can always get another one.
That’s pretty fucking gross to be honest. But that dynamic plays out where VAs have been, let go without proper notice where there’s a bit of a downturn in the business. And the first thing to go is the Vas. Where a business will shut down and immediately all the VAs are out of work and there’s no employee protections or anything like that in the business to look after. So on the receiving end of that, imagine you’re a VA and you’re working for an employer and you’re in constant fear of someone firing you or letting you go, or you’re just thinking, “You know what? My employer doesn’t give a shit about me.” Now, it’s not all Western countries that have been responsible for this, part of this is the BPO industry. So the call centers really just don’t care about their people.
They hire the absolute minimum wage. They know there’s a hundred million people in the Philippines. They know they can get another person any day of the week and so that culture of feeling disposable tied in to the history of the Philippines, the cultural history of literally being enslaved for a couple of hundred by the Spanish, you can see where that plays out in the business world. So we have to do so much. We have to do so much to unwind that with the people that we employ. We just don’t hire VAs full stop. A number of the VAs will basically cruise between different employers, they’ll Moonlight with multiple employers at the same time. The other thing that will happen is anytime they get a little bit more pay from someone else, they go, “Yeah, you beauty I’ll jump onto the next person.”
So we just don’t hire those kinds of VAs. The people that we hire are those who have had a corporate career. They’re looking for something different and we bring them into our business and teach them how to work from home. Many of them have not yet worked from home when they work for us. And we just avoid that VA culture altogether. It’s a massive problem, and they’re not the kind of people that you want to go for. They also happen to be more expensive as well, because they’re just jumping from employer to employer, trying to get as much as possible, but you don’t want to have a business relationship with your employee, which has them in a fearful position, and has you in a position of… You’ve got to make sure that you do your part, which is making sure there’s a safe space and that you’re looking after people as well. Cool. So I’ve covered off culture.
Next. I want to talk about the challenges of work from home, specifically technology. So we have our team working at home. It’s a choice that we’ve made not to put our team into an office. I don’t like the idea of my team getting in a jeepney, which is the public open air buses in the Philippines and sitting in carbon monoxide for an hour to work and an hour home from work. I’ve got a little bit of a bug bear about that personally, and I also have a very big concern for the health of the Filipino people sitting in those open air buses in five or 10 years, there’s electric buses coming out. Manila’s changing a few other cities are changing as well, but right now I don’t think it’s safe to be outside for that amount of time. Traffic is also terrible that’s a factor as well.
But for anyone who’s worked from home versus commuting, you would know that if you spend two hours a day commuting, it is a suck on your life. It really, really is not great. Particularly Filipino people love the family culture and looking after each other and being home with their families. So, if they’re schlepping it down to an office, it just really, really takes a toll. I would say one of the most important reasons why we took everyone home was that, it was just not having to travel.
Now, it comes with massive challenges because internet connections are probably the number one challenge. We have a number of ways of dealing with that, backup connections and, and whatnot. Number two is making sure that people have the right hardware. Often someone will be working on a computer that they’ve had for a number of years. It’s not really up to spec. They’ve spent the least amount of money that they can spend on it because Filipinos are pretty savvy, but that also means they cheap out on some things.
So if you’ve got a worker who needs to get their work done, and they’re, they’re running on a laptop that is five or six years old, they’re just not going to be very productive. One of the other challenges that we’ve had is things as basic as screen sizes. My marketing manager started working for me. I’m sorry, Angela, I’m going to call you out. And she’s working on one screen on a Mac book air, and it wasn’t even enough to view the whole Facebook ads and, just scrolling. And I was like,” What the fuck are you doing get a bigger monitor. So you can actually see the work that you’re doing.” Basic things like that. Not everyone will think about.
There is a very big culture in the Philippines of being dictated by your employer, what you need to do. If you’re not dictated to do something, then you may not do it. That is broad. I’m applying it to technology right now. So that means that you need to develop as a business, your technology framework, your technology policy, on exactly what you expect from your team members and exactly what they need to do. Whether it’s having multiple monitors, having a certain amount of RAM, having a certain internet connection and a certain backup connection, having a place that you can go to as a backup location, if your primary internet connection goes down, making sure that you have an action plan on where you go for your backup location. All of those things need to be in place so that team members can be effective working from home because internet connections are a massive issue.
There’s also basics like if they have five other people working at home in the same home that they’re living in, some people do, especially if they’re young and living at home and sharing with flatmates, they’re probably going to be working online. If at least one of them is working online. What that means is that you need to make sure that you know how many people are using that internet connection and whether or not that may be affecting the quality. If you’re using a system like our cloud-based phone system called Dialpad, or Google voice, then you need to make sure you have a decent internet connection. And you may need to install a router, which does a quality of service, or it’s called data prioritization, which will actually divvy up or split up the internet connection and make sure that everyone has enough bandwidth to do the work that they need to do.
Again, Filipinos being conservative, being a bit cheap. Sometimes we’ll choose the cheapest internet connection that they can get, and so you may have to dictate, all right, you need to have at least X internet connection, and then they will know what they need to have for the business.
Further expanding on that idea of not doing unless being told to do. There’s a few other areas where it’s really important where you need to make sure that you’re dictating this to your team members and where we’ve had challenges for our team. Got a couple of people who’ve joined. We have Neil, thanks very much for coming along, and Chris say hi guys, and if you’ve got any questions, please go ahead and drop them down.
If you have team members and they are working directly for you and you’re international company, they’re probably not going to be getting health care. They’re not going to be getting insurance, and they may not even be contributing to their own version of the super fund, which is called SSS in their own country. They may not even be paying taxes. Now it’s not up to you to enforce them to pay their taxes or anything like that. But I would encourage that you encourage them to.
But one of the challenges that we’ve seen is in the early days where we didn’t dictate paying for healthcare, even paying for PhilHealth, which is their version of government healthcare, similar to our Medicare system, but it’s voluntary payment there. When we had team members who weren’t paying their PhilHealth payments, which are very small payments, a couple of hundred peso per quarter. We had accidents happen. And so we had one of our team members fall off a motorbike, hit his head, very, very minor brain damage needed some recuperation time, and thankfully it was only a couple of thousand dollars in hospital bills, but that was more than a month’s salary for him.
He didn’t have the money to pay for that. So then you’re in a situation where a worker says, “Hey, I’m going to have to quit my job. I’m sorry, I can’t work for you anymore, I need to loan this money from friends and family so I need to go and work for them to pay it off,” and it just turned into a complete mess. All because they hadn’t paid a couple of hundred pesos, which is 10 bucks a quarter on their PhilHealth, which would have covered most of that expense had that been in place.
We’ve found that we have to actually dictate and make sure that our team do those things, because if you’re not locally incorporated in the Philippines, if you’re just paying your team as international contractors, which is, and I’m not a lawyer, but that’s the structure that we’re in currently. Then they may not be taking care of those things themselves. So having a policy around what kind of things need to be taken care of there’s then the issue of private health care, they’re called HMOs. How all of that works and how that works in with what you pay. That’s all important as well. We’re going to cover more of that in our course, Remote Work Playbook, so check out the link to that below, have a chat to our team, if you need some help getting access to that.
So making sure that you actually have those allowances in place, some of your team may want an extra 50 bucks a month or an extra 100 bucks a month to get that premium internet connection, like if they’re a video editor and you want them to have a 100 megabit fiber connection, spend the extra a hundred dollars a month, but let them know here’s your salary, and here’s an allowance on top of the salary for X. That’s very important because that’s how the pay system works in the Philippines.
If you don’t put the extra expense as an allowance, they’re probably not going to pay for it. Unless you have a very strict policy and policing and everything else, you’re going to need to have an extra allowance on top of their pay, to pay for extra expenses, just like that. Okay. So the last challenge we’ve had is team members needing money or being in financial situations where they’re not able to get through family expenses, or they’re not able to have enough funds to purchase IT equipment that they need to do their job. And they come to us as the employer to ask for support in that area.
This is a very common thing. Within the first six months, there’s a bit of a running joke that, you’ll be hit up at some point. So we’ve developed a framework and a policy for this, we’ll be sharing that with our members. What I will say is that make sure that you are reasonable with this. It is very helpful for your team to be in a position to lend money. You will need to have a policy and a framework around that. So you can manage the risk of that. We’ve not lent anyone money and had them disappear. Our pride is very important for Filipinos and the culture. So that’s been unlikely.
We have had one or two people disappear and keep a monitor or a headset that we bought for them, but it’s more likely that you will have someone need to upgrade their computer, to get their work done and ask you for support in that area. So we’re very happy to support our team in that area. We have some guidelines around minimums, how long they’ve had to work for us, how much we’re willing to lend all of those kinds of things.
I’ll be taking our customers through that on our member’s webinar. It’s actually coming up in an hours time. It’s at 11:00 AM this morning, but if you don’t jump into it this morning, then you can catch that in a replay. Thanks very much for listening in guys, I’ve run through all of the biggest challenges that we’ve had hiring staff in the Philippines. If you’re interested in getting help with this, our eight-week online course, it’s called the Remote Work Playbook is going into depth on all of the topics of running a successful remote team.
So this week we’re covering hiring, onboarding, and especially hiring in the Philippines. We’re going to be going through what are our actual IT policies like what computers they need to have at home? What are the actual it policies for what we will lend people money with? What websites do we use and what are the job ads that we use? I’m going to be sharing absolutely everything to hire and recruit your team. How do we onboard them and what tools do we use? So we use a tool called Google classroom to onboard our team.
We’re going to be showing you guys how we use that to onboard the staff and how we actually, get them started from zero to being a productive employee. All of that is going to be showing everything live with how we actually do it in our own business. So if you want access to the Remote Work Playbook, or you’ll need to be a concierge member of ours, that starts at eight bucks a month, extremely affordable, the price is going up soon. So you want to jump onto that before long. Don’t wait for that because we’re about to do a price increase.
Unfortunately, based on the cost of our team in the Philippines, our global economies are changing. We’re going to need to actually increase our price for that product. But if you join now, then you will stick on the original price that you’ll be grandfathered in. So you’ll get an amazing deal there. So make sure you check that out. If you’re not yet a member of our two Facebook groups, one is called Remote Revolution. It’s all about growing and scaling remote teams, which is where we post stuff like this and I’m in there to answer your questions as well. Next, we have our other group, which is G Suite Community. So if you’re already a user of G Suite, that’s the number one software platform that we implement to small businesses, check out the G suite Community group.
If you’d like to have a chat to our team, get some help, consider joining our membership, then head along to itGenius.com/chat. I’ve got a link down too there as well. You can chat to our team, jump on a call, jump on a hangout, have a chat about your business. See where you’re at and see whether or not we’re a good fit to help you out with anything technology. We help small businesses empower their remote teams, get working remotely and get everything rocking and rolling. All right, until next time, see you later, we have an interview, hopefully this evening 5:00 PM. Look out for an announcement on that. If not this we have two call live streams happening tomorrow, and we will see you soon. Till next time, take care. Cheers.
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