John Jonas (Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast, Ep. 234) discusses health risks faced by online Filipino specialists (OFS) required to work night shifts and shares practical employer-focused strategies to reduce harm. Jam, an OFS who left the call-center industry due to night-shift health problems, contributes tips: keep schedules consistent, minimize schedule changes (recommendation: no more than once per month), allow at least three days to adjust to a new schedule (circadian rhythm shifts ≈1 hour/day), encourage exercise breaks, and provide PhilHealth or private health insurance. Jonas adds: when possible let OFS work daylight hours, check in regularly about how they're coping, and consider pairing night-owl and morning-owl workers to cover shifts.
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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 234, keeping your OFS healthy as they work the night shift. So I'm not a morning person by any means. I do not like getting up early at all under any circumstance. But I'm also not a night person and I'm really more of like a solid 11 to 7:30am person. If I don't get eight plus hours of sleep at night, my skills start to deteriorate. And skills like physical skills, mental skills, typing skills, relationship skills, all of my skills start to go downhill if I'm not getting eight hours of sleep. And even just like one day of if I get up, if I try and get up for an early bike ride or something, man, I just struggle the next day or that day. I am mean to my family. It's a dis. And not everyone is like me, but everyone needs sleep. So when I hear about people requiring their ofs to work the night shift when they really don't need it, boy, I gotta question that. So let's talk about working the night shift. So typically, across the board, for most people, working the night shift just is not healthy. Now, obviously there are exceptions to this. Some people are night owls. They really love being up at night and their circadian rhythm, they doesn't kick in their melatonin production until really early in the morning. So they're really happy to stay up late at night. And that's cool for those people. And if that's who you hired, awesome. But if you hired someone that's struggling with it, this can become a real problem. It creates insomnia, hypertension leads to diabetes. There's all kinds of issues with working night shifts that are scientifically linked to it. So before I record this, I talked to Jam, who is one of my ofs, about healthy habits when working the night shift. So Jam left the call industry, call center industry, years ago because he was working at night and he started having some really significant health problems. He's super talented, but he was just finding that staying up all night is not working for him and his body. So I asked him for tips on what employers can do to try and help their OFS be more healthy if they're requiring a night shift. Here are his tips. So, number one, he said, avoid changing their schedule too often. So it's not actually staying awake at night that causes the health problems. It's the changing of schedules that changes their sleeping, which doesn't allow them to fall asleep correctly or to stay asleep or to wake up correctly. So if someone then isn't able to get eight hours of sleep because their schedule is changing every day or every week or every couple weeks, their body can't adjust to it that quickly and it just creates a problem. So if you can maintain a steady schedule, it becomes way better for them. Next, he said give them time to adjust to a new schedule. So if you have to change a schedule, change it first of all as seldom as possible. He recommends no more than once a month. But number two, he says give them at least three days to adapt to a new schedule. From the study that I've done, our body can only change its circadian rhythm by about an hour a day. So this is why we have jet lag. When we travel long distances, your body changes by about an hour a day. So when I fly to Europe, it's about eight hour difference. It takes me about a week to get accustomed to the time there, which is what science says about our bodies and our time schedules. So the fewer times you can change their schedule and the more time you can give them to adjust to that new schedule, the better off they're going to be. Next. He says encourage your ofs to exercise and to take exercise breaks. He said he has an elliptical machine at home and if he's working at night, he will take 10 minute breaks multiple times a night and get on the elliptical. One, it helps to stay awake at night when you're exercising. Two, he really has a hard time exercising during the day because of his schedule. And this gets his exercise in at night. And exercise is just generally good for everyone. His last tip is if you can, if you can afford it, provide either philhealth or private health insurance. So everybody has health problems at some point, but if you're working at night, they're more likely to happen. And so if you have health insurance or philhealth, at least then it's one less thing to worry about. When you do have health problems, you don't have to pay for it. You can go to the hospital or that's with health insurance. With philhealth, it's going to decrease their cost. It's not the best, it's not the same thing as health insurance, but at least it's something. So if you as an employer can afford to provide these things, definitely do it. It's one less thing for them to worry about and it will let them go to the doctor or when they have problems. So now here's a couple tips for me that I have experienced over the years. Number one, if you don't need someone to be working on your time zone, consider letting them work their own daylight hours. It's just a lot more healthy for me. I find that not having them online during the day, my time is really beneficial to me. I don't get interrupted. My working time is super productive. I get a lot of work done while I'm asleep. When I get up in the morning, I get to give feedback. They get to do their work, I get my time, they get their time. It's really, really good. Next, if you do need them to work the night shift so that they can be online during your time, be respectful and recognize that they're going to have problems. Like they're not. They're going to have times where they're not going to show up on time or they're going to disappear for some time or maybe they need a nap in the middle of the night because it's just really hard for them. And if it were me, I would be paying attention to this and asking them on a pretty regular basis, how are you doing? How are you doing with the night shift? Are you okay? And then the last thing that I've noticed over the years is lot of my workers in the Philippines either get up super early or they stay up super late. And with those two things, I found that usually someone stays up super late and someone else gets up really early. Their hours almost exactly match when one of them ends and one of them begins. I've seen in the Philippines that like first of all the sun comes up super early because they're right on the equator. And so sometimes people are getting up at 3:30 and that's just kind of their normal day. And that's like the sun comes up at 4 or 4:30. So that's part of it. And then other people are like staying up late at night and they're staying up till 2 or 3am which those two times really, really come close to overlapping. So if you can find someone who is a night owl and someone who's a morning owl, you can combine those two to having a full night shift. Now obviously this isn't practical for every situation. I understand that sometimes you need the same person or you only need one person, you don't need two people. But this is another option if you're having multiple people work the night shift where you can let them work how, how their bodies function better and it's just healthier for them.
