The Philippines has many public holidays, but not all are mandatory days off. Remote work continues as long as internet and deliverables stay on track. John Jonas shares practical advice for employers outsourcing there, including a public Google Calendar of Philippine holidays.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 221, why the Philippines has so Many Holidays. So today I'm going to read to you something that one of my ofs wrote. And they wrote it in first person as if it were me writing. And she wrote it so that I could publish it as if I had written it. And she also wrote it as if I had all this knowledge about why the Philippines has all of these holidays, which I don't. I don't really know, except she sent this to me. So there are two takeaways that I want you to get from this. Number one, the Philippines has a lot of holiday. There's a lot of days off. Not all of them are required to have work off. And you'll see that in this post. And you should be aware of when these holidays are. Well, I mean, my ofs will explain it all in the post that I'm going to link to below. We'll also talk about some of it right now. And then my second takeaway is you can find really talented people in the Philippines. I get emails. I get an email once a week from someone that says, I found an amazing content writer. Their English is perfect. And then I get emails every day from someone else that said, I hired this person. They're amazing. I hired that person. They're amazing. You can find really talented people. Okay, so let's get on to why the Philippines has so many holidays. Let me read this to you. She says, no, you're not imagining it. The Philippines has a lot of holidays. In fact, they're number four in countries with the most public holidays. It's intentional. Sometimes the government even adjusts the holiday calendar to put the holidays closer to the weekends. Because of that, it feels like they have even more holidays than what's listed on the calendar. So why does the Philippine government allow this? Doesn't it hurt their economy to have so many public holidays? Surprisingly, it doesn't, mainly because when you have a long holiday, you're more likely to travel. This benefits the tourism industry, one of the biggest contributors to the Philippines GDP, which employs 13% of the population. And if you look at the Philippines, who wouldn't want to go on vacation as often as possible? I have an OFS who goes mountain biking on the weekends because he lives so close to the mountains. Some of my ofs have talked about bringing their laptops to the beach on weekdays so they can have a change of scenery While working, even during the pandemic, Filipinos continued to travel where they could because it wasn't easy, because it's sometimes safer to be in rural and coastal areas where it's less crowded rather than in the city. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if they have a lot of holidays. As long as they have good Internet connection, they can work. And as long as the work gets done, my business keeps growing. So that's the end of what she wrote about why the Philippines has a lot of holidays. And I told you, she's a talented, she's a talented writer. So below this video or this podcast, I'll have a link to the public Google Calendar that we maintain, which is all of the Philippines holidays. So this is a, it's a calendar that we put together that is public. You can subscribe to it. If you click the link, you're going to get a calendar in your browser. And at the bottom right hand corner there's a plus Google Calendar link. You can add it to your calendar and it will then just add all the Philippines holidays as holidays on your calendar. And you can color, you can change the color of that so it shows up differently. I have it as light yellow so that they don't stand out glaringly to me on my calendar. But that's a super simple way to know, oh, there's a holiday coming up. Also, there are a lot of holidays in November and December, which right now is mid November. And you should know about these holidays, so just be prepared for it.
