Ep. 206: Follow Up On Disaster Proofing Your OFS

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 206, follow up on disaster proofing your OFS. So I had a podcast episode recently about disaster Proofing your OFS and I got a really interesting email from Jared after that podcast. Here's what Jared says and he asks a bunch of questions. So can you provide more details on your emergency fund? How is it set up, how they apply for it? I also heard of some employers providing generators or other means of backup. Is this something you tell them you'll reimburse them and provide receipts? My OFS has two ISPs, but can you get more? Things are going great, but sometimes it'll be silent for a half day and I'm not sure if there's some service interruption or personal emergency or just checked out without telling me. Would love to hear more on these topics or point me to any articles that you've covered in the past. So I'm going to try and answer all these questions right here. Can I provide more details on our emergency fund and how it works? So basically the emergency fund is just that we have told our workers that if they need to borrow money that they can come to us in an emergency. So we're not here to like give you random money at any random time, but in case of an emergency, like a death in the family or a natural disaster or there have been a bunch of things where we've had them come to us and say, hey, I'm short on money for this thing, whatever it is, can I borrow it? And then I'll pay you back by taking that of my salary for this many months. And this is pretty common in the Philippines. So we've done it like my school, my kids school tuition is due and I need $500 and I'll pay it back $100 a month. And we've done that a number of times and then over five months we just take it out of their salary each month and they pay it back. And we've never had a problem getting this paid back. Or like last year we had someone borrow $600 to to pay for a parent's funeral expenses. And then we took it out of their salary at $100 a month. Sometimes we'll do less than $100 a month or $50 a month just depending on what they say they can afford. And then sometimes we may send them money and not ask for it back. Like last year there was a Big typhoon that came through Cebu and really destroyed one of my developers houses. And he moved away and we helped him move and when he moved back we sent him some money just to try and help him rebuild that we didn't ask him to pay back. He's really great and we really just kind of want to help make their lives better. So then the next question was about generators. Do we provide generators or pay for them? So we've never done this. I've heard of other employers doing it and usually they've come back to me and said, oh yeah, this was a problem because when the Internet's out then, or when the power's out then their Internet's also out. Now that's becoming less of a problem today with mobile providers. But still the Internet will still go out and if power's out then the air conditioning's out and it just gets really, really hot and maybe it's too hot to work. And so it's not something we've ever done. You can talk to your ofs and say, hey, would a generator, would a backup generator be helpful for you? Is that something that we should do? You could offer to pay for it. It's not something we've done. Next question. Can he, he already has two ISPs. Can he get more? So that will depend on where he is in the Philippines. So a wired connection, there's usually only one option but for mobile connections it depends on where they are. Some areas only have one mobile data provider where some areas have like four. And so yes, they more backups if they needed to. And just so you know how that works, they can buy a prepaid reloadable data access where if they're using their wired connection, they're not using their prepaid. When they need to use their prepaid because their wired goes out then they, they can use it up. And if they run out then they just go to a local sari sari store and reload that. So they're never losing. They're not like paying monthly for extra something that they're not using. So that having a backup is totally reasonable. Depending on where they are, they could have more than one backup. So then Jared's last question was about them disappearing for half a day sometimes. And let me just say this is pretty normal. It's pretty normal for someone really anywhere to disappear for half a day. Like you have a doctor's appointment or you need to pick your kids up from school or your kid's sick or there's all kinds of things that would cause them to disappear for half a day and not tell you. And especially in the Philippines where if they tell you that they're having a problem, then you might get mad at them. That's the worst case. So they would rather just not tell you, hope you don't notice or hope that you don't notice and then they'll make it up tonight. So they're going to do their extra work later and that's a better situation for them also. So what we provide for our people is when you're going to take time off. We hope that you'll tell us ahead of time whenever you can. If not, then let us know as soon as you can. But it's not an emergency for you to tell us if you're having an emergency. Then they also have like email and some of. Some of my ofs have my phone number and they can text me or their slack. They could always tell someone else on the team who could then tell me that they're gone. But we're not super concerned with them missing half a day or even a day. It's really more of like you have an extended period of time that you're going to miss, then we really want to know. And then if they just kind of disappeared for multiple days, then you have a problem. If it's a half a day, I'm not really concerned about it. But if it's going on for multiple days where you haven't heard from them, now you have a problem. And if you want to find more about that, you can check out on johnjonas.com search disappear and you'll get some really good stuff about why they disappear and how to prevent it and how to solve it when it does happen.