Tips For Success In The Filipino Workplace

How did Philippine culture come about? When I first, one of the reasons I chose the Philippines, there's quite a number of reasons. I've been here a few times, but as I said, I was 25 years in the US and I thought.

American culture, American colony. For 50 years, the Philippines history was basically, they're just a bunch of scattered islands. Then the Spanish missionaries came along and then for 330 years it was a Spanish colony administered through Mexico, which Shannon's really interesting because 330 years of Spanish colonial rule and nobody speaks Spanish. You think you'd be getting a Spanish speaking va here. There's no Spanish here. There's just a few of the very old money, original Spanish families from 500 years ago. They, they still speak Spanish a little bit, but you won't find a va speaking Spanish, which, which is a shame. So they were ruled by the Spanish and the Americans came along and we had 50 years of American culture and that ended right after World War II. So I'm thinking it's, it's very Americanized. Like you'll notice like the Shangri La and stuff like that. It's, it's very much. I'm like, how hard can this be? I don't, I'm not really up for a real cultural change. I just think it was going to be very normal when I moved, I was completely wrong. It's very, very, very culturally different. And I'll explain a few things.

So through my, my kids are, my kids are in school, born and raised here. And so I get a lot of the understanding of why they think the way they do, because I obviously think the way I do. And I always thought, oh well, they're going to grow up like me thinking the way we think. And I'm not saying which one's better. There's so many things I love about the Philippines probably more than I love about our culture that I think is they're doing it better than us, they're happier than us to start with, so they must be doing something right. So I'm just trying to, I'm not saying which is better. I'm just saying what's different here. And my kids are growing up.

Filipino, basically, even with my Western influence just from this school.

And so I've really, through the kids and my business, you know, having over 100 employees over the years, I've really developed an understanding of kind of what makes them tick.

So when you have a Filipino staff, there could be, you might have some thoughts of I'm the boss, you guys Just adapt to me. Just do it my way, do it my culture and that'll break down in your relationship. They will leave after three months or three weeks. So it's really a joint merger of the two cultures that will embrace the cultural diversity and collaborate with them on that. So.

There'S really strong social customs here. One of them, I hope those that had Filipino vas did this. If you didn't, you made a big faux pas. You've gotta bring a gift. It's a very gift giving culture. They call it Parsi lubong.

And there's other really weird quirky cultures they have. If you have a big meal on the table, they will never eat the last bite. They'll always as being such a friendly, hospitable society. You might be walking down the street. If you walk out of the Shangri La and just go into the neighborhood, you'll walk down the street and you'll hear this sir, let's eat. Let's eat. From coming out of the neighbors they just yell out let's eat. They don't really mean it. You know, don't actually go in there and eat because you might take away their last food. But they, they say let's eat. And as I said they're very big on, on gift giving. So big one about the, the culture. We are very individualistic. I know if I want to get a project done myself, I turn off my phone, I lock myself in the room and I just put heads down and. And I get it done through cult culturalism. The Filipinos.

Go back 500 years and it's just a bunch of individual islands living. They call them barangays which is little villages and they're very individual little villages. But within that village and this holds through to today it's called the barangay. They live. It's almost communist in a. In the way of social. When some of social issues. When something goes wrong and I'll. And I'll touch on this when, when they need help, the whole village stretches out. I know, you know, I live in a small little barren guy and I, you know, I've got a three year old daughter. Often we don't know where she is. Now you're gonna go what? We don't. I don't know. I don't know. She'll show up. And then 8 o' clock at night one of the neighbors comes in and delivers my little girl home because she's somewhere in. And she's safe in this little, in our small little town. It's totally safe. Big difference Right. I, you know, I know you can't do that in Australia, but. So a big thing on collectivism is if you haven't experienced this, you will. When grandma gets sick or something, they have some kind of family emergency, they're going to ask for money. And that's just how it works. They don't, they shouldn't be just asking you. They're asking everybody and everybody in their village, kind of not everybody, but whoever can, whoever has the means at the time will chip in and help solve this problem. Whereas we wouldn't dream of knocking on our next door neighbor's door and saying, you know, excuse me, my mother's in the hospital, would you mind chipping in 50 bucks? You know, it's not anything going to happen for us, but for them they do. So what I suggest in situations like that is as long as you've got a good employee that you value and has been with you for a while or whatever, when that happens, chip in. But don't feel like it's your only obligation because they're asking their whole social network around them, around them to help. So when it comes to the work environment.

This is why I think in my experience, especially during COVID where we got sent home, I have an office based VA company where we're, we're fully supported and they out where we're completely different from Workpod. It's different model we have in the office. Support from each other, support from coaches, support from trainers, support from quality assurance managers and all of that. They really work well together. They. In fact, when I opened my office I had the cubicles with just a standard, like call center cubicles. You'll see a lot of that tomorrow. And I've since shifted to tables like this because it's more collaborative and they just do better.

Collaboratively.

So they're very good on teamwork. Huge on social.

The office culture is they've got their family and they've got their work and their work is their social life. They go out all the time with their friends and.

So let's put them together.

Okay, so here's a big one for those. Almost all of you have one. The sir and man. I know when I started here it just drove me crazy. I didn't like being called sir and I've got my head around that now. So I remember, you know, once I was a few years in and, and I talked to one of my employees and I said, look, I'm really uncomfortable with you calling me sir. Would it be okay if you just call me Would you just call me Rodney? And their answer was, okay, sir, yes, sir.

It's just deep grained. It's a respect for.

Somebody older than them. It's a respect for their boss, somebody in a higher position. And it just, he is. So just learn to live, I think learn to live with sir and ma'. Am. You know, a few, I talk to a lot of business owners about this issue and some of them go, no, no, I just don't want to be called. That's okay. But you're asking them to change their culture if you, if you stop them from calling you sir or ma'. Am.

So I go with, go with their culture. All right, here's a big one.

Family. This is probably the biggest thing, a cultural difference. We Australians might think that our family's important, but, and you've, she, you know, you're raising a family and you're running a business and there's some conflicts. And I think you, you might be sometimes conflicted. I've got this business meeting, but I've got to take my kid to school and you know, in the Philippines, screw the business meeting. I've got the family obligation. It's very family orientated. So this is where systems is so important and redundancy and, and as you can build, you know, a bigger team like our, my company, we, we tackle this by. If you need a full time assistant, we give you two part time assistants to cover this redundancy. Because every family emergency, you lose them, whether it be for a couple of hours, a couple of days, or they, they quit. I just lost. I have an employee. She's been with me about seven years. She's the breadwinner of the family. Because she's been with me so long. She was one of our highest paid employees. She makes more money than she could ever make doing anything else. Her mother just died a month ago and now she's got an elderly father. She's got three or four siblings that are all unemployed, doing nothing. But the father wants her to stay home and take care of her, so she quits. That's their family obligation. It's also typically because we tend to hire the rock stars, we are hiring the cream of the crop in Filipino society. And that person who can do all of these great, they're very, very talented. As you know, if you get a good va, incredibly talented. But they're also recognized as the talent in their family. So when something happens in the family, although there might be three deadbeat brothers, no, they need her to take charge of everything and they need her to step out of work. It's so crazy, but it's the way it is. Family comes first. I think it's actually the number one thing. When I ask Filipinos, Filipinos ask me, they say, what do you love the most about the Philippines? I said, well, first of all, I think what I love is your family structure, your family obligations. It's incredible. Your family values are so fantastic. And they'll say, what do you don't like the most about the Philippine life? Your family values and your family structure. And, you know, because it really does get in the way. So the point is, on a business level, you need to plan for this. You need to be flexible. As long as you, you know they're a valued employee and you know they're not lying to you. If they have a true family emergency, you've got to let them go. Otherwise they'll just, they'll quit. So even if they, if you say, if they say, I need to take three days because grandma's in hospital, you can't take it. You can't take it. They will quit. And because they have an obligation. Because if grandma is in hospital and Mary is not by grandma's side and all the other families going up to take care and show grandma the respect of being by the side, all going to go, where's Mary? And they're going to judge Mary's lack of presence. So Mary's got to go do that. So that's a big one.

I hope you enjoyed that clip. Just a heads up, it was a snippet taken from the Business Systems Accelerator program, which is the world's first training for systems champions to help you build a systems driven organization. If you'd like to find out more about the program, head over to systemology.com BSA and I'll see you in the next video.