John Jonas explains how the Filipino concept of saving face leads OFS to hide mistakes instead of fixing them. When shame is involved, workers avoid admitting errors or making edits. Four strategies help: assign clear titles with authority, ask staff to think through issues gently, link quality to business reputation, and make ownership explicit.
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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 283 why your OFS sometimes work mindlessly because of Saving Face in the last podcast episode I talked about mental health and how someone had not taken mental health services because they were concerned about losing face. And that employer also had talked to me about how he had noticed that saving face had sometimes caused problems. Well then I also got another email from another person asking a very similar question and this concept of saving face is something that you may have noticed with your ofs. It's something I've definitely noticed over the years and so I want to talk about it. So often if they make a mistake, or if they fear making a mistake, or that you'll think that they're making a mistake, they'll do almost anything to save face rather than confront it and fix the problem or be embarrassed by it. You're less likely to lose face if you pretend the problem doesn't exist and ignore it or do disappear rather than fix it. So let me read you an email that I got from someone and hopefully this will really get into the problem. The email says one of my team members explained that shame and saving face are a big cultural thing in the Philippines that can drive people to do things like lie and take actions that may not be good for the team or the business. For example, we have customer service knowledge articles that are poorly written and need improvement. I need our team to grow and improve themselves. I don't have time to police everything and direct every area that requires improvement and growth, but I'm concerned that one reason it may be difficult for them to make improvements is out of saving face and not wanting someone to feel shame. If a template or article that a team member wrote needs to be edited or improved. In my American way of thinking, it's shameful for the company as a whole to provide poor experience for our customers or inadequate information. This is just one area of a number I can think of that this shame save face concept might be harmful to the business. Is this something that could be leading team members to deliberately not help improve and grow the business because they are fearful of shaming themselves or others if something is wrong or insufficient. How can I help counteract this and help the team desire to improve and grow the business to help our customers? So I love this because I have experienced and felt these exact same things and so let's talk about it. I went to Julia about this person I'm going to tell you what Julia says, then I'm going to tell you my take. So here's Julia's take. She says, culturally, we are not encouraged to be direct. It's considered rude. Hints and signals are considered more polite, but it can also be confusing if people don't understand our culture. These are remnants of our past as a colonized country. You're punished when you speak up. And our upbringing as a Catholic patriarchal country. Don't talk back to parents or superiors. This leads to a lot of miscommunication because we're so afraid of being direct. Being direct is rude because it implies you think you're better than everyone else. So we communicate mainly through social cues and hints, which I'm going to add to this. Social cues and hints don't really come through over email and project management and chat. It doesn't work super well when you're not face to face. When our cues aren't read properly, we get embarrassed. We feel frustrated because we are not understood and we misunderstand things instead of taking it out and airing out concerns. The tendency of some people is to do everything they can to save face, to preserve what's left of their pride. The this is why we often tell job seekers it's best to be upfront and frank when talking to potential employers. We explained that our version of being polite and respectful is detrimental if you want a good relationship with your employer. We tell them that speaking up isn't rude and would be better in the long run. That's what Julia said about it. Here's my take on this. Culturally, they don't want to be wrong. I mean, nobody does, right? Nobody wants to be wrong ever. But this feeling is especially strong in the Philippines because if you're wrong, you lose face, you're embarrassed, and potentially you get fired. So if there's a chance that there's going to be wrong, which would cause them to lose face, they'd rather not attempt it or work on it or do anything towards it or pretend it isn't wrong. Just ignore the whole thing. So like, for example, they see an article that is wrong and they think, should I fix this? Well, why? Like, what if I'm wrong about it being wrong and then I've made a mistake when someone else was correct and I stood up and then I'd get in trouble and I make a fool of myself. I'd be embarrassed and lose face and I could get fired. So now I'll just ignore it and pretend it's not wrong. At least that's often the thinking. That's often the way of thinking. Now, I will tell you that I have seen this in my business, I don't know, a thousand times over the last 18 years. I've seen this so much. And for a long time, I really struggled with how to help change this. And part of that is because, like, wow, we're talking about hundreds of years of history and culture here. We're talking about the person you're working with. This is how they were brought up. They were brought up Catholic and patriarchal and don't talk back and don't say anything and save face and don't be wrong and the whole thing, right? So, I mean, there's a lot of culture going into this. Here are some things that I have done to counteract it. So, number one, try giving them a job title with responsibility. When Filipinos are given a responsibility like you are responsible for overseeing this thing, they take that responsibility really seriously. Especially when there's some authority with it. If they have authority, it's a really big deal for them to follow that authority. So if they're responsible for it and they know they're responsible for it and other people know they're responsible for it, they're much more likely to step up. This second thing I've done is I've tried to ask them to think more in a really nice way. So if you go about this with the approach of, you need to be better, you need to improve, you have to do this right? The chances of them say, hearing from you, oh, if I don't do this, I'm going to get wrong. If I don't do this, I'm going to be embarrassed. If I don't, if this doesn't get right, I'm going to get fired. They're going to hear it in a really negative way. So when you approach this, you have to do it in a really, really nice way and saying, look, this is probably my fault. The way that we've done this. I've probably not allowed you to think. I would really love it if you could think through these things more. And then the next step that I have taken is associating that with business success. Hey, look, when we don't take these steps, when we don't make something that's good, like if we put out something that's poor or this article goes to a customer and it's really not good, that looks really bad on me. It looks really bad on the business. The business doesn't do as well. We would really love to perform really well. And we want our customers to know that we really care. When we send them something that is crappy and they see that, they know, oh, we don't really care. Which reflects poorly on me and it reflects poorly on you. So the last thing that I've done is tried to explain that I want it to be their responsibility to make this thing great. Whatever the thing is, whatever they're working on, I want you to make sure that it is great. Not me. That's not my responsibility to make sure it's great. Because you're the overseer of this thing. So when you do this thing, I want you to check it, I want you to double check it, I want you to talk to someone else about it. And then when it is great, yeah, I just want to see it before it goes out. But I don't want to correct problems with it. I shouldn't be correcting problems with it. You should be correcting problems with it. And before it comes to me, you should feel like, wow, yeah, this is really great. Yeah, this is ready for. This is ready for John to see it. And those are the four things that I have tried to help make this work. So one, give them a title and responsibility number two, asking them to think more, which is not that different from the other two, the next two, but explaining the consequences of poor work on. On how it reflects on the business and then telling them that I want it to be their responsibility to make things great. Hopefully this helps you understand the Philippines culture of saving face and them not wanting to be embarrassed and not wanting to lose face and why they disappear and why poor work can be delivered. You just don't want to lose face.
