How I Handle Holidays & Paid Time Off With Filipino VAs

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialist. This is episode 160, how we deal with holidays and paid time off. Holidays and paid time off are a big deal for me actually running my own business. There is no such thing as paid time off or everything is paid time off. I'm always getting paid for whatever I do because I don't sell my time for money ever. And a lot of people ask me, like, how do you get to this work week? And that's really a key thing. I work about 17 hours a week. It's because I will never. I never sell time. I won't do a consulting. I won't do something for you. That's a key piece to me of the four hour work week or the 17 hour work week is about how much I work. So I've spent a lot of time on vacation this summer. Spent a month in Europe riding bikes with my family. I got home for six days and then went to a youth church youth camp for five days. I came home for one day and then spent 10 days at Lake Powell home for about a week and a half from Lake Powell. And I'm leaving tomorrow to mountain bike national championships. Then I have a few days home, then we have family vacation and then another Lake Powell trip and then school starts. It's a busy summer. I love it. A lot of vacation. So the question comes to me, how do you deal with vacation with your. With people in the Philippines? So here's the question from. This is from Mike. I'm going to read this because there's some actually, really, some really good stuff in this. How does your company handle time off work? He says, we have 13 ofs working for our company in the Philippines over. Is it 14 now? I have to think hard to count as we keep growing and hiring. Congratulations, Mike. That's awesome. And actually, when I sent this out as a newsletter, I got a response from someone that said, wow, 13. That's amazing. I'm just trying to hire my first. You know, everybody starts with one. If you haven't hired someone yet, go hire someone. Not everyone's like Mike and has 13 or 14, but Mike's also not alone in having 13 or 14. I know. I mean, I know a lot of people that do. And if I were to guess, I'd probably say we have thousands of customers who have more than 10 people in the Philippines working for them, because it's so dang good. Okay, so continuing with Mike's, question. Anyway, one area I'd love to learn more about is how you handle holidays, vacation, and sick leave for your team. Specifics, especially about which holidays you give off. How many days of vacation or sick time do they earn more as they work longer? What about maternity leave? Typical to be three months in the Philippines. As I learned when our first ofs had our baby paternity leave, this will be a new one for us as a baby's on the way later this year. Rather than try to Understand Philippine Holidays versus US Holidays, our policy is just to provide 25 days of paid time off. We'd love to hear specifics about how your company or others address time off, especially considering cultural differences. So that's a lot. I'm going to try and answer all this. Let me start by saying I love Mike's policy of 25 days off. 25 days off period. Like, you can take them however you want. Holidays, sick, vacation. I like that policy. So here's our policy. Our policy is you can take whatever time off you want or need or I don't really care. I don't care how much time you take off. I'm not going to track how much time you take off. The one thing that I want to know is I would like to know ahead of time if possible. If you're sick, obviously you can't know ahead of time. That's fine. Just keep me updated. If you're in the hospital, I get it. I'm not going to fire you when you're, when you're not here. If you have, if you haven't shown up for a week, I'm not going to fire you. So the sooner you can let me know, the better. And I've had people on my team have like their sister email me saying, I'm so sorry, he's in the hospital and he can't email you like, okay, cool. Thank you for letting me know what's going on. You know, then I want to know, how can I help? And so our policy of however much time off you want counts for, like, oh, you want to go on vacation. Oh, there's whatever this holiday is, I don't know what it is. Because the Philippines has so many holidays. I don't want to track which holidays are the most important and which ones are less important and which ones you're taking and which ones that person's taking. I don't want it. I don't want to do it. And so I don't do it. You know, like, you had a family member Die. You need a week. Cool, Take a week. Julia just went to her in law's house for a month and she still worked while she was there. But I know she was way, way, way less productive while she was there. Which, which great. You know, she's amazing and so is her husband who also works for us. So yes, take the time off. Okay, so next question. Maternity leave and paternity leave. So maternity leave in the Philippines, mandated 90 days. And if your OFS is paying SSS their Social Security system, the government actually pays their salary during that time. And they know how much to pay based off how much SSS contributions they make. Because SSS is based off of your salary. So how much you pay is dependent on how much you make. If you're paying into it, then the government knows like you just had a baby. Okay, well, we'll pay you. This I've often seen is people in the Philippines getting this payment from the government and then trying to come back to work as quickly as possible so they can double up, which good for you. That's my policy. Paternity leave is one week and that's like government policy in the Philippines. One week of paternity leave and we always just pay our people that week off. So here are a couple things to consider in this. So if someone has an urgent job, customer support, for example, then we would like them to work out covering the hours with their team members. So I don't know how many customer support people we have, but we have enough to double cover 24 hour shifts. And so if you're going to be gone, then we would like you to work out with other people to make sure that customer support is still happening really quickly. For sicknesses, like if you're sick and we don't expect you to make the time up, we just want you to try and any urgent work needs to get done on time. And so for holidays or whatever, like that's our most important thing, like just keep the urgent work up. Now we have very little in our company in terms of deadlines, so this policy works really well for us. It's not going to work super well for everybody. And for example, for us, December is a really slow month. Typically people don't want to hire someone in December. They want to wait until January and they've made their New Year's resolution to hire and then everybody hires. December's slow for us, but for a lot of people, December is really high. So like we give all of our team the week between Christmas and New Year's off That's like the lowest time of the year for us. And so we give them all a full week. But for a lot of e commerce businesses you can't do that. So in that case, my policy doesn't make sense for your business. And so what I see them do doing is saying, hey, please work all of December, I need you every day. And then in January we're going to take two weeks off. So here's what I suggest for you is number one, make a plan. Like what plan? What days do you want them to have off? And us holidays is not important to them. You can find the holidays for the year at onlinejobs PH Holidays, where we have both a list of the holidays and their dates done every year. And also there's a calendar that you can subscribe to. So in your Google Calendar or whatever, your Outlook calendar, whatever, you know when holidays are coming up. And then when you have a plan, ask your team like, does this work for you? Is this, is this reasonable? This is what we want our company policies to be. Give us feedback. And you, you may or may not get like positive or negative feedback from them, but at least you've presented to them and they know what the plan is.