How Online Jobs Reunite Families and Build Better Futures in the Philippines

Working as a virtual assistant in the Philippines used to be looked down upon. And now today, if you hire someone, you are considered a lifesaver. It's now the dream job. What happened? So, years ago, when I had a small team of people in the Philippines working for me, and they had asked if they could work in an office, like they were working from home. And a couple of them asked if they could work in an office, and I was like, sure, you could. Why? And they said, well, there's a couple reasons. One, we're lonely. Like, I'm working alone and I don't have anybody else, and that's lonely. Two, people look down on me working as working for you. And I was like, what do you mean they look down on you? They're like, yeah, they don't think I have a real job. They think it's like some weird typing for dollars thing. And like my parents say to me, why don't you go get a job in an office that's respectable? And, and this was, to me, this was really shocking to hear. I mean, I knew these people were getting paid better than their office counterparts. They're working from home, like on their own hours. I knew that foreign bosses were like a really good thing for the Philippines. And yet working as a virtual assistant was looked down upon. Well, this was 2005-2006-2007-2008 when this was happening. Well, we built online jobs in 2008, launched it in 2009. People started getting jobs and upwork came on the scene. I don't know, 2008, something like that, and people started getting jobs. And over the last 10 years, and really even less than that, the last maybe six, seven, eight years, the view of working online in the Philippines has significantly changed to the point where working as a VA in the Philippines, as a VA as an OFS in the Philippines is considered a dream job. Like this is. This is the dream job. So let's step back for a second. Here's what it used to be in the Philippines. They have an acronym there, ofw it, it means Overseas Filipino Worker. Why do they have an acronym? And that acronym is like government backed, government created, government supported, OFW overseas Filipino worker. Because 10% of the Philippines lives overseas. There's 100 million people in the Philippines, 10 million of them live overseas, which is the number one export of the Philippines humans. And for so, so many years, this has been the dream job of people in the Philippines. You get a job on a cruise ship, you get a job, a nursing job, you get A job doing something overseas in hospitality. And then you go overseas and you work and you send money back home so you can support your family. Because there just hasn't been a lot of ways to support a family in the Philippines. Well, people don't know this until they're gone, but they miss their family and they don't get to go home that often. And usually this turns into a long term thing where like if you're married and you have kids and now you get a job overseas, you're not seeing your wife or your kids anymore. So I have someone on my team, he has two kids, I think, and his wife is working overseas. And he sent me an email. It's been a couple months, but recently that said, I just want my wife back. She, she's been gone for six years and we see her like once a year for six years. And when she comes back this last time, she has a contract, she can't just come home. But when she comes back this next time, we're going to get her a job working online so she doesn't ever have to leave again. And that's the reality of OFW overseas Filipino workers. And so for a long time this was the dream because you could make so much money and send it home to support your wife and your kids. Well, now there's another option. Now if you learn English and you learn some skills, you could get a job working online for a foreign company and stay at home and make more than what most people are making in office jobs and support your family and see your kids and be with your wife or your husband and it's such a better situation. And this has gotten to the point now where like, working online is the new Filipino dream. This is the dream job, is to get a job working as a va, as an ofs, as an online Filipino spouse specialist, where you have a really great boss, a great, really great foreign boss who is consistent and long term and treating you well. Well, now, you know, we know that not everybody is consistent or long term or treating you well, but that's the dream. So I actually got an email from someone in the Philippines recently who's described to me how her boss had saved her life by giving her a job. And I forwarded this email to people on my team and they were like, yeah, don't you know this? And I said, no, I don't know, I didn't know. And they said, yeah, we look at our bosses as lifesavers. So let me explain this a little bit further. So I talked about OFWs where they would go work overseas and send money home. Well, the stakes are really high in the Philippines there are not that many jobs. There are places where there just are not jobs. So my son was serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints there. He's home now, but he spent two years there. He spent a good long time on the island of Marinduque which is an island just off of the main island of Luzon where Manila is. It's not a small island but the economy there is basically non existent. It's just farming. I mean there's some small things but finding a job there is really not an option. So if you're going to make money, you're going to raise chickens and sell them, I mean there's just not options there. But the Internet there is quite good. And so for them the ability to find a job and support your family just isn't there. And so he knows someone there who's looking for a job. He's finding a job in Manila far away. So he's going to go take a boat and then a taxi and then a trike and then a bus and then he'll find a place to live there in Manila for six months while he works there away from his wife and his kids. And then that contract will end and he'll come back and then he'll look for another job. Right. And it's really a terrible situation. So he went to my son and said hey, can your dad help me find a job? And my son knew this person really, really well and, and I did. I helped to find a job. He was asking to make US$400 per month. Now this is 2023, so not that long ago. Now US$400 per month is too little. It's too little even for a beginner in the Philippines working online. In fact the lowest wage I think you should ever pay and this is for a complete newbie who lives in the provinces like Marinuke is $3 an hour. But he this guy Mark Gem looks at his boss as a lifesaver for him and his wife looks at him as a lifesaver for him. And his kid who is two doesn't know this yet but his two year old son is going to look at this boss Jason as a lifesaver. This two year old doesn't know this yet but his life will be different because his dad got a job working online. And I've talked to Jason, it's been over a year. Jason absolutely loves Marc Jem and loves the work he's doing. And Mark Jem goes out of his way to do great work and it's really amazing. And this kid doesn't realize that he's getting three meals a day now because his dad's making $400 a month and he gets to eat where before, I mean his parents were pretty, pretty resourceful, but not making enough to eat three times a day. And that's pretty common. A lot of people in the Philippines are just scraping by despite speaking really good English or even having a university education. You know, the opportunities just aren't there all the time. And if you struggle in the Philippines, there is no recourse. Like there's, there are no government programs to say, oh yeah, here's, here's, here's welfare or here's Medicaid. Those things don't exist in the Philippines. So finding that job working online really changes things for people. And let me add, let me add another caveat to this. So if you do find a job in the Philippines, let me, let me give you, I'm going to give you three descriptions here. One was the one that I just gave you of Mark Gem, where if he didn't find this job, he was going to have to go to another island, another city far away and live there for months on end and work there. Which, adding to that, the, the second thing I want to describe is commute times are terrible in the Philippines. Like two hours each way is, is pretty common. So when someone gets a job working from home, you just saved four hours a day for that person. Which you know, that's the difference between seeing your children and not. And so yeah, you're a lifesaver to that person in the Philippines. Then here's the other situation. So I've only been to the Philippines once, it was in 2010. And we're on this small island, Boracay and which is a super touristy island. And every day we have a masseuse coming into our place. Now we stayed there for five weeks. I took my family, we sat on a beach for five weeks. This was the four hour work weeks version of a mini retirement. So we have this masseuse coming in every day. We're paying her $2 an hour and we found someone that we really like. So we keep having her come back. And $2 an hour was the going rate at the time. Now this is 2010, you know, it's more than that now, but still like really, really, really affordable. Right? And so since she's coming every day, I start, I start talking with her, you know, how are you here? What's going on? How do you have this job? Oh, she's from Manila. She took a 14 hour boat ride to get here because she found a job. She's here for six months. That contract ends at the end of six months. She's no longer a masseuse, so really she has no training at all. And after six months, she's going back to Manila and to her home and she'll try and find another job. And so it's this really unstable situation and really a vulnerable situation where you're traveling far away from home and you don't know who's there, who's going to receive you, you don't know how you're going to be treated, especially as a young single female. It's a really vulnerable situation, the Philippines. But this is what they have to do to survive. And so, yeah, that online job that they get is life saving. And when they get that job, they want to do anything they can to keep it as long as they're treated well. Okay, so let's talk about you. Because getting an online job is the Filipino dream. As long as really important, as long as they are treated well. So what does that mean? Number one, it means that they trust you. They trust you as a boss. You're not yelling at them, you're not threatening them, you're not telling them you're going to fire them. If in the Philippines, it's really important culturally that they trust you. I know you go into this thinking, oh, I don't know if I can trust them. But the reality is it's more important that they trust you than you trust them. They come into this with the same feeling of distrust as you do. Their feeling is stronger than yours. So you have to do things to get them or to gain their trust in you. If they trust you, it's a dream job. How do you gain their trust? Well, you give them training, you give them feedback, you pay them well, you are involved, you're not an absentee boss, just giving demands and expecting the world in return. You recognize that they're human and not a robot, and you treat them as such. You treat them as a human being who, you know, they have family and they have problems and they have needs and they're not going to show up every single day because something went wrong. But, but they're going to do their best. And if you recognize they're doing their best and that when they make a mistake, well, there's probably a reason they made a mistake. If you treat them like this, then they have their dream job. In addition to them having their dream job, you will likely have your dream employee, independent contractor. They will go above and beyond what you asked them to do so that they can keep this dream job. They will consider you a lifesaver. They'll invest in themselves to improve themselves. They'll invest in your business. They'll be invested in your business. The longer they work for you, the more they know, the more they'll contribute. The cycle just snowballs and snowballs if they trust you, if you do things to make it a dream job for them. So now some of you listening to this are like, yeah, totally, I've totally experienced this. I hired this VA and she's amazing. Or I heard this ofs and he's doing this and this and this and it's so great. And so some of you are, some of you are thinking that, but some of you listening to this are like, well, I got a different experience. Like they just keep disappearing on me and they're not reliable or they're not talented or they're whatever it is. And if that's you, if you're saying, well I don't agree with you, then I would like you to rewind three minutes and listen to me talking about you have to gain their trust. If they don't trust you, none of this applies. You have to be there to help them succeed. You have to care about them. You have to make sure that they are succeeding in the job you give them. It's your job to make sure they're succeeding, not their job to make sure that they're succeeding. No, they want to do everything they can, but it's still your job as the boss to make sure that they are succeeding in their role. If you've hired someone and it does work out, the point is this is super duper fulfilling. Not just on a yeah, my business is succeeding, my business is growing perspective. It's also super fulfilling in knowing you've changed someone's life. You've changed a generation of lives, you've changed their kids life, you've done some good in the world and this child or these children are eating three times a day instead of twice a day. You've probably changed their grandparents lives or their parents lives because they're being taken care of financially now. There's so much more to hiring people in the Philippines than just finding this amazingly talented workforce who want to do good work for you. You're also a lifesaver.