In this solo podcast, John Jonas explains how employers can effectively manage Filipino virtual assistants (VAs) during the holiday season without sacrificing productivity. He begins by highlighting the cultural mismatch between U.S. holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve) and the Philippines’ own calendar, noting that many U.S. holidays are not observed in the Philippines while Filipino holidays such as All Saints’ Day, Bonifacio Day, and the week‑long Christmas period are. He stresses that Filipino culture places family above work, especially during the December‑January stretch, which can lead VAs to prioritize family over job duties. To mitigate disruptions, he proposes a suite of scheduling tactics: creating a leave calendar that marks non‑negotiable work days, staggering time‑off so different team members cover complementary holidays, offering half‑day shifts during peak periods, granting a full week off for the whole team (except essential support staff), and arranging “swap” days where one VA works a holiday while another takes it off. He also discusses compensation approaches, contrasting hourly pay (which typically excludes paid time off) with salaried arrangements that enable unlimited or generous PTO policies, and advises offering time‑and‑a‑half for work performed on a VA’s local holiday. Communication is another pillar: employers should educate VAs’ families about the legitimacy of remote work, set clear expectations early (ideally by October), and document policies in contracts or emails. Finally, he recommends using an online Philippines holiday calendar (e.g., from OnlineJobs.ph) to stay aware of regular versus special holidays, and to align company policies with those dates. The episode concludes that while there is no universal standard, combining cultural awareness, proactive scheduling, fair PTO structures, and transparent communication allows businesses to keep operations running smoothly during the holiday season.
Chapters
Va's working over the holidays. Is it possible? How does it work? Paid time off. Let's talk about the whole thing. People always assume that their culture is like the culture of the world. And in the us we're especially guilty of this where we think, oh, Thanksgiving, everybody has Thanksgiving. Well, yeah, actually they don't. They don't have Thanksgiving in the Philippines. Not at all. Now they know what it is because we're so dominant that people pay attention and they know we have Thanksgiving, but they're not days off for them. Whereas they have Rizal Day. And we have no clue that's going on. We have no clue that they're not working or they are working on a major holiday of theirs. So can VAs work over the holidays? The short answer is yes, they can. Do they want to? Well, that's a completely different story. Let's get into the whole of it. November, December are coming up. In the us we have a lot of holidays. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. In the Philippines they have more holidays. And sometimes it even seems like they have a holiday every week starting mid November until after New Year's. So they have All Saints Day and All Souls Day, which are late October. And those are around Halloween, but it's not Halloween. Although All Saints Day is, or All Souls Day is about Halloween. They also have Bonifacio Day at the end of November. So they do not have Thanksgiving. So November 25th or 27th or whatever it is in the US. In the Philippines they're not celebrating this. But then in Christmas, other holidays come along. The Feast of the immaculate conception around December 5th, 8th, 10th, and then Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and then New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. Now, Christmas Eve in the US and New Year's Eve in the US are not holidays. In the Philippines they are. And I actually think there's one more in this time frame, I'm not sure what it is. So the question is, can your VA's work over this period? So here's how this works. The holidays in the Philippines are really, really important, especially the week of Christmas to New Year's. It's a really important time. And the Philippines is very family driven. Most people will prioritize family over job. And almost every time, which to us is really weird because when we have a backwards culture where work is the number one most important thing, and if work interferes with family, well, screw you family. At least that's the culture in the us. Well, in the Philippines they have their priorities more correct, where family is more important. Than work. And so when work interferes with family, very often they'll choose family over work. So this is one of the problems with hiring in December, where a new person doesn't know what you're going to do with the holidays. And so they're really hesitant to start a new job. December 10th, when December 24th and 25th and 26th and 28th and 29th and 31 and January 1st, they really need to be with their families or they're going to be ostracized and they don't know what your situation is. So if you're running an e commerce business, December is your busiest time of the year. You need people working. You just have to set expectations for this. So going into December and probably really going into like October, you got to set a precedent to when people can and when people cannot have time off. So here's a couple things that you can do to schedule this. So number one, let them know, hey guys, our most important time of the year is December. I need you here. Number two, you can create a leave calendar. Like, here are the days you absolutely cannot have off, and we'll have to work around this. Another thing you could do is try and schedule days off for some people and days off for other people. So like, for example, you would give Christmas Eve and Christmas off for this person and then they're going to work New Year's Eve and New Year's Day while this person works Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so they can swap so they get some of the time off. It's not a perfect solution, but it can work. Another option is to propose time off during other times or maybe even more time off during other times of the year because this time is so important to you. So let's say, hey, look guys, I need you to work all through December, So we're going to take two weeks off in January. Now, some VAs may have a problem with this because of family expectations again, but if you incentivize it enough where you're maybe very slow in January and so you can afford to have them take the time off in January, they can probably work this out. Another thing that we do is we give our people half shifts during the important times when they want time off. So for example, customer support, we still have to cover our customer support during the Christmas time, but we allow our people to work four hour shifts instead of eight hour shifts. So they're just working less. So the good news is most people in the Philippines are working on laptop. They probably can't work while they travel, because they're on a boat for 12 hours and there's not really Internet. But when they get home, they can continue working their shifts while they're home with their family. Now, they're probably not going to be as productive. They're probably not going to get as much time. They have a lot of family demands, but they can still maintain. And this is one of the things that we have our people do. Another thing that we do, we give the whole week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day off for our entire team, except our customer support people, who we still require half shifts, and then our programming team or our dev team, where we need to make sure the website is still functional. And we just require that they check things every day so they know, oh, the website's down or there's a problem or something is wrong, so that we can make sure it's back up. Now, we rarely have that problem, so they rarely work, but it's still a requirement. Another thing we do is we encourage them to talk with their families a lot of times because they work from home and not a traditional commute into the office job. Families sometimes don't take their jobs seriously. They think, oh, you just work from home, you're just in your pajamas, you're free, you can do anything you want. And they don't take it as a real official office job, which carries prestige with it in the Philippines. And so sometimes families will look down on them for not having a real office job, or they'll just assume you're going to be a part of everything because you don't go into an office, you don't have required hours, and so you don't actually have to work, which this can cause problems. So what we encourage is talk to your families, make sure they understand. Make sure they understand you have a real job, you have a real boss, you contribute value to a company that's doing good things in the world. Talk to your family. Now, in all of this, there's not really a standard practice. There is no accepted way to do this. These are just different things that different people do, kind of how we do things and what you might do. Now, let's talk about a couple other things. So holidays in the Philippines, are they the same as in the U.S. no, typically they're not. So, like the Fourth of July in the U.S. they don't have that. They have Philippine Independence Day, a different day. And actually the Philippines has more holidays than the US throughout the year, and they have different kinds of holidays, kind of like we do, but theirs are more solidified. So they have regular holidays, they call them, which are real holidays. Christmas Day is a regular holiday. Independence Day is a regular holiday. Rizal Day is a regular holiday. And then they have special holidays where like All Saints Day is a regular holiday, All Souls Day is a special holiday. And a special holiday kids are going to be off school, which might mean parents are going to have a hard time working and banks may or may not be closed and some businesses will be open, but some will not. And so a special holiday has different circumstances and it's not set in stone whether people work or not. Now how do you know what the holidays are? Should you be giving your holidays or their holidays? Well, I really recommend that you give their holidays and if you require them to work on their holidays, offer them time and a half on their holidays. They don't necessarily care about your holidays. So offering to have your holidays off while it's fine, it doesn't substitute for allowing them to have their holidays off. Now, how do you know what their holidays are? Well, at onlinejobs Ph Holidays, we'll tell you. We have a list. We also have a calendar, a Google calendar that you can subscribe to that will put the Philippines holidays into your calendar so that you know, oh, there's a holiday this week, so they're probably not going to be working this Friday. It's always super helpful to me when I may not check my calendar, but then I notice, whoa, what happened today? Nobody worked. And then I look at my calendar and like, oh yeah, it was a holiday yesterday, so I didn't get any work done from people yesterday. That calendar, it really makes things simple. Again, you can find that at onlinejobs Ph Holidays. On that same page, we also deal with paid time off. Now, how do you deal with paid time off? Well, there is no standard here. You can do this however you want. You don't have to give any paid time off. And actually if someone is working hourly and they're tracking their hours and you're paying them an hourly wage for their hours, then typically they're not entitled to paid time off because you're paying them for every hour they work. And if they don't work well, then they don't get paid. This is one of the reasons why we prefer to pay a salary so that people can take time off. We want people to be healthy, we want them to have vacations, we want them to be good and functional with their families. So for us, we offer paid time off. We offer unlimited paid time Off. And this takes care of sick days. Now, a lot of people offer 5 sick days and 5 paid time off days or 10 sick days and 10 paid time off days per year. Whatever you want to do. There is no standard for this, but it would be good for you to talk about it with them. So when I hire someone, I let them know, hey, we have unlimited paid time off. I don't care what days you take off. I just want you to be productive when you're working. So if you're sick, let me know. Let me know ahead of time. Let me know when you get sick. If you're going on vacation, let me know. Ask for time off and I'm almost always going to give it to you. If they have unlimited time, what we find is, number one, they don't take advantage of it. Number two, if they're sick, they don't feel like they have to work. They can say, hey, I'm sick, and that's okay. There's also not a reason for them to lie about things because they can just take more time. Now, my way doesn't make it the right way. You can do whatever you want here. Generally, if someone is being paid a set salary, then you should offer some paid time off for them. Typically, they should work five days a week. In the Philippines, most people are working more than 40 hours a week. If you're only having them work 40 hours a week, they're probably, probably going to work another job. This will limit their downtime since if they're not working for you, they're probably working for someone else during that time, which can be problematic. You need to work that out with the people that you're working with in all of this. It's helpful if you talk about this with your people. Put it in writing, send an email, put it in a contract, let them know what your policy is. That way they're not wondering and worrying about it. And for working over the holidays, it's the same thing. Let them know ahead of time. Let them know early in October, November, so they're not worried about it. So they can make plans for traveling home or they can make plans with their family because it's a part of their life.
