John Jonas breaks down why Filipino remote workers vanish: over 90% of the time, it's shame about not understanding a task, rooted in cultural norms around face and power distance. The fix is simple: train clearly, email assuming you caused the problem, and ask how you can help.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 188. My Filipino worker just disappeared. So I've heard this quite a few times. Let's talk about the disappearing Filipino worker today. So there are typically like three situations in which someone from the Philippines will disappear. So number one, you just hired a new person, you give them their first task, and then they tell you they have to resign. That's one. Situation number two, so you've had someone working for you for a bit, maybe it's been a few weeks, three weeks, they've done really good work. Then suddenly you don't hear from them for a week, or you just don't hear from them at all again. And then the third situation is you've had something working with you for years, they stop responding to your emails and you don't hear from them for a month. So in over 90% of the cases that I've seen, the cause of this is usually that the person is embarrassed about something or they fear being embarrassed. So here's what happens. They don't know how to do something. They don't know how to do something you've asked them to do. They don't feel confident, they don't understand something, they can't figure something out. They don't like the work. They realize, like, oh, man, this is something that I thought I would be able to do what they're asking me to do, and I can't do it. So in the Philippines, their reaction to this situation is to disappear. When very often the problem could be that they don't have enough instruction or they don't understand your instructions and they think they're supposed to understand it, not that your instructions are supposed to be more clear. In their culture, it's their responsibility to understand, not yours to be more clear. Which, you know, it kind of doesn't work in this situation. And so what they do is rather than lose face, they get. They call it shy, and they shy away. They back away from the situation, from the job, and they hope that you will say something to them because you are the person in authority. And there's this power distance index, which if you don't know what that is, look up power distance index. And so they're hoping that you'll say something to them about it and hope that you will help them solve the problem. So if this happens to you or when this happens to you, because it's probably going to happen to everybody at some point, A worker is going to disappear at some point. I've had it happen to me probably like 12 times over the years. Maybe more than that, maybe, I don't know. But it's going to happen to everybody. So here are three things that you can and should do. Number one, provide training. Like, if you provide training, it gives them the assurance that I have something wrong here. But my boss was willing to work with me in the past, and so maybe he has some training for this that I don't know about. And if I say to him, hey, I'm stuck on this thing, hey, I don't know what to do, Hey, I don't like this, then maybe he'll be understanding and he'll help me out. If you haven't provided that training to them, then they don't have that to look back on to fall. They don't have that assurance that you care about them in order to. For them to be willing to come to you. And that's why I talk about giving training all the time, because it's more than just about training someone to do something. Right. I had someone this week email me and said, this is so unprofessional of them to disappear. They can't do this. That's just wrong. I'm like, well, that's the culture. Like, you hired someone in a different culture and you have to deal with their culture. And this is the culture. Like, you don't want to train them, you want to hire someone. That's amazing. But the training is still part of the culture. It's part of what makes this work so, so well. And that's why we created VASmadeEasy.com, which is training for you to give to the worker that we have created so that you don't have to create these giant training modules. We've created them for you. You can just hand it off. And then they know, like, my employer cares about me. He cares enough to buy this training or he cared enough to create this training. Whether they know the difference or not doesn't really matter. He cares enough to help me get better at my job. Okay, so the second thing you just do is email them and tell them, I think you have a problem. So when this happens, that's when they disappear. This is your first, the first reaction. Now, the first thing I gave you training is to help prevent this from happening. If it happens, though, the first thing to do is email them and say, hey, I think you have a problem. I don't know what the problem is. I probably Caused the problem. Take responsibility. I don't. I don't know what's going on, but, yeah, it's probably my fault. And then the third thing is, how can I solve this? How? I would like to know what the problem is so I can try and help you solve it. And I've seen this solve so many problems over the years. So many disappearing Filipino problems. When you ask, hey, how can I help you solve this problem? First of all, you assume, I think there's a problem, and I think it's my fault and I probably did something wrong or I probably my training wasn't clear, or I didn't give you enough direction or whatever it is. How can I help you solve the problem? And that is how I prevent the disappearing Filipino problem. Like, this is how you prevent someone from disappearing. And frankly, I've seen, like, I don't know, 100 people have this same thing. Solve the problem. My brother hires a programmer and after three weeks says to me, hey, John, what's going on? He just disappeared. I haven't heard from him in a week. He was doing amazing work. Well, you probably gave him something that he's stuck on something. My brother emails him, and two days later, my brother emails me back and was like, you were right. He was stuck on this thing. It took me like five minutes to solve it for him. And now he's back working great again. So provide training, which will save you so many hours and so many thousands of dollars in over the years of lost work or productivity or the whole thing. Training. Ask what? Assume that there's a problem. Ask what the problem is and ask how you can.
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