John Jonas explores how Filipino family obligations differ from US norms through an employee named Jam, who worked from waiting rooms during his mother's medical appointments. The episode shows how flexibility and trust-building help employers retain remote Filipino workers facing pressure to choose family over jobs.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 323, choosing between your job and your parents. So this is an interesting one because Filipino culture revolves so much around family. Parents and grandparents care for children. Adult children are expected to care for their parents. It's a whole big cycle, and it's very, very strong in the Philippines, which is different than the culture in the US where parents raise their kids until they're 18 and the kids are on their own. And that's really the end of it. For a lot of people in the Philippines, that caring continues and continues and continues. And for a lot of people, this is not easy because of the financial situation. And in the US we very often choose our jobs over our family. And in the Philippines, that's just not possible, partly because family ties are so strong. And then if you don't choose your job over your family, well, you might starve. Like, for a lot of people in the Philippines, there aren't jobs where you work. And so you have to go travel either to another island or overseas to work in order to provide food for your family. And then you're away from your family and you're not caring for them other than just financially caring for them. It's hard. But when you work from home, you're an ofs, you're working at home, you don't have to worry about that. You get to do both. So this email from Jam, one of my ofs, was eye opening to me. Not because he's grateful for his job, although I do. I did learn some things from what he sent me, but because of the family culture that I'm learning. Actually, he sent this to me for the newsletter. He wrote this specifically so I could talk about it in my newsletter and my podcast. Hi, my name is Jam. I. I'm one of John's ofs. I do customer support and quality assurance. By the way, Jam is amazing. My mother had a medical emergency a few weeks back. Thankfully, she's doing better now. But because of that incident, this means my mom had to go to several doctor's appointments almost every day for several weeks. If I had a regular job, I would have had to take a leave of absence. Knowing how long that leave would be, I might have considered quitting. I know how stressful the situation can be being pulled on both sides. You're worried about your parents health and you want to be there for them, but you're also worried about whether you'll still Have a job when you get back. You're scared for your parents and scared you won't be able to provide for my own family. But because I work from home, I didn't need to quit. I didn't even take a leave of absence. I was able to work because I had my laptop and my parents do have Internet in their place. I also have my mobile data with me for times we are out. In fact, the work actually helped me fill the time in waiting rooms and between doctor's appointments. I can be there for them without worrying about work. So that's the end of this email from Jam and I will just fill in because I have other details about the situation that these. This was weeks of doctor's appointments where he had to take his mother to the doctor's appointments either. Well, Jam now has a car, but in the past they didn't have a car and they would have had to ride a jeepney together, which she couldn't do alone. It's hard in the Philippines and so this would be like an all day thing for a doctor's appointment. And so if he had a job, this is like days and days and weeks and weeks on end without being able to come in to work where he works from home, it's not that big of a deal. He takes her to the doctor's appointment, he takes his laptop with him. He continues to work at the same time. Now when this all happened, actually after this happened, because I wasn't even aware that this was going on, he just kept doing his work and never really missed a beat. But after this happened, I learned he would have considered quitting his job over this. Not just like asking the employer, hey, I need to take three weeks off because my mom is sick and has to go to the doctor. Hey, he would have just quit. Which is kind of the experience that I've seen people have in the Philippines, especially if they're new at online work, when they don't understand, oh, I can go do this work while I'm out or my boss wants me to continue working and so I'm going to talk to them about it. He would have quit rather than continue working. Now that's different than in the US and to understand this, you have to understand that in the Philippines, missing work like this or missing a lot of work carries with it the chance of being embarrassed and losing face, which is a really bad situation for them and they would rather quit than have that happen. So how do you prevent this? Well, really big thing is gain their trust. You need to do things to gain their trust in you so that when they have a problem, they'll come to you and let you know about the problem and hope that will help them out. Now, in Jam's case, he didn't need any help. He just needed to know, oh, it's okay. I can go to these appointments, I can do my work. Maybe I'm spending a little bit less time, but my boss is flexible and he's caring and he's going let me take the time off. In order to get there, you have to gain their trust. And part of gaining their trust is being caring from the beginning, being flexible, providing training for them, talking with them, being there and communicating with them on a daily basis, responding to their daily reports. There's a bunch of things that you can do to show, hey, I care about you and about your success with our business.
