John Jonas's Filipino employee kept working from the hospital while her father had orthopedic surgery. He explains why family emergencies look different in the Philippines, where people stay at hospitals for days, and how his company handles it: no formal PTO tracking, just take the time you need.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with your OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 327. My OFS has been working from the hospital. So I didn't know this. I didn't know that my OFS had been working from the hospital. The other day I got an email from her and she so she makes social media creatives, she does posts and ads for me and here's what she says. Good morning. I will try to finish the ads as soon as I can. I'm currently at the hospital. My father got car accident yesterday. Neck of his femur was broken, hip fracture and needs an orthopedic surgery. Doctors are still monitoring him because his blood sugar also rise. Also rise. I'm here in the hospital but I am still working to finish contents for the social and again I will also try to work on it given the situation. Thank you for your kind considerations. So I'm going to talk about Hospital Watchers in a few episodes, but just so you know, someone going to the hospital, a family member going to the hospital is a big deal in the Philippines. My brother and I were just talking about this the other day. It's super different than here in the us. People are always telling me, oh, why are they always like, oh, my aunt's in the hospital. Oh, my father's in trouble. Or well, that's part of their culture. My brother was like, oh, by the way, did you hear mom was in the hospital a few weeks ago? Like, no, I didn't hear that. But in the Philippines it's very different. So if someone goes into the hospital, everybody in the family knows and everybody in the family is involved. If there's a death in the family, it is required for everybody, everyone to drop whatever they're doing and get there to take care of funeral preparation. When there's a problem in the Philippines, family has to be involved. So when you hear your OFS saying I'm so sorry I couldn't work or I need to take the next week off because and then it's a medical excuse or it's a death or something like that, it's probably legit. So here was my response to this OFS of mine. I said, thank you for letting me know. I'm so sorry about your dad. If you can't get things done, don't worry about it. We're not super concerned if things don't get done right away. Also, feel free to take time off. We don't track time off Take as much time as you need. So now a couple of thoughts here. Just so you know, accidents in the Philippines seem to be more common than in the U.S. i mean, I just talked about that. But you'll notice this. Obviously, there's more time spent at the hospital in the Philippines than in the U.S. number two, our policy for paid time off is that you can take as much time off as you want. We don't track it. We don't care. We don't. We. The only thing we do is we want to know ahead of time, if possible. If you're gonna take some time off, let us know. That way we at least can anticipate it. And if you can't, let us know it's because you're sick or there's an emergency, that's fine. Just let us know as soon as you can. We also find that in the beginning, people are very, very hesitant to take any time off at all. It takes a long time before they're willing to take time off. And then the longer they work for us, we find the more willing they are to take time off. As a third thing, I've never had someone abuse this, like, oh, I'm taking a week off this month. I'm taking another week off this month. I'm taking a week. I've never had that happen. And the reason we do it this way is because. Well, number one, and really the primary reason is because we don't want to track it. We don't want to give ourselves one more thing to do. Now, maybe that's our personalities. In my business, you can track it in yours. That's fine. We also want people to feel comfortable knowing you have another emergency. This is your third emergency this year. That's okay. We're not going to ding you for it. We're not going to. You're not going to lose your job. We want you to work your job and to be comfortable, and we want to help you live a better life. So if you hear about your ofs working from the hospital, know that it's not uncommon. And it. It's. It's pretty common for people to take time off because of family emergencies. I will talk about Hospital Watchers in an upcoming episode.
