John Jonas explains how rural Filipinos organize work by daylight and heat rather than clock time: starting at sunrise, resting at midday, stopping at sunset. US employers who don't adjust expectations for this cultural difference waste interviews and create unnecessary friction.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS. This is episode 334, telling time in Some Places in the Philippines. I was talking to my son Austin, who is on a mission in the Philippines for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. He is a missionary assigned to a little island, Marinduque, and I learned something that I had no idea about, and it makes so many things make more sense. So he said, in Marin Duque, they don't really strictly follow time. Yeah, they have clocks and they have watches, but the time of day doesn't really matter to them. They more schedule things based off of morning, noon, and night. If it's. If it's morning, it's time to go to work. If it's noon, it's time to eat and time to sleep, take a nap. And then if it's night, well, it's time to go to bed. So I got someone complaining to me recently that they. They had a bad interview with someone in the Philippines, and they had. They had required this person to get up really early to be onto the US Person's time schedule. And then they were offering kind of a crappy job. And I only know this because the Filipino said something to me about it, and the Filipino was pretty upset about the whole situation. Like, you made me get up really early. You're offering a crappy job. I'm not interested. And so, yeah, that's why I wasn't attentive on the call, because I didn't want to be there. And the person in the US didn't understand that. Yeah, like, that's a person. And they have their own culture and their own needs to sleep, and their time works differently than yours. Right. So then I started talking with Austin, and he said, yeah, people work when it's cool outside, when it's hot, it's just time to go take a nap. It doesn't matter what time it is. It's time to take a nap. When the sun goes down. Yep, it's time to be done. Everything's done when the sun goes down. Doesn't matter if there could be more people out where you could make more money or you could still work. It doesn't matter. Sun's down and that's the end of it. Now, obviously, it's not like this everywhere, but in rural places in the Philippines it is. So I asked Julia about this, and I got some more interesting responses about timetables in the Philippines. Here's what she said. She said. This is more common in the more rural places and in sleepy towns in the Philippines. For example, my father in law's hometown in La Union, which is what we talked about in the last episode, said, it's really small. You can hear the church bells and PA system wherever you are. We noticed that most people and some businesses base their schedules on the morning prayer, noontime prayer, early afternoon, Angelus, etc. Strict schedules don't make much sense when you're in a sleepy town. There's no need to rush. It makes more sense just to start working at sunrise, rest when it gets too hot, noontime, and stop working when it gets too dark. That's the same stuff my son said, she continues. Another reason why schedules don't make sense is the public transport system here in the Philippines, specifically the jeepneys and tricycles. Now, if you haven't seen a jeepney and if you're watching this on YouTube, we'll put a picture of Here's a picture of a jeepney. If you're just listening to this podcast though, you need to go search jeepney J E E P N E Y you get some crazy pictures. This is how the public transport system works in the Philippines. These are privately owned things. This is not a bus, it's not government owned. And here's what she here's what Julia says about it. Jeepneys don't have timetables. They only make a profit when they're full. In small towns, if we need to go to the market or the provincial capital, we have to go to the terminal and pray that when we get there, the the jeepney is almost full and about to leave in a few minutes. If we find a mostly empty jeep, we can always eat, nap, read, check our phone, etc. While waiting. Patience is needed because it can take a significant amount of time if there aren't enough passengers. The closer you get to the city, the stricter schedules are followed. When I was living in Manila, I knew the MRT schedule by heart. There are buses round the clock and traffic apps are good at estimating ETAs, but not the jeepneys. They always have operated on their own time, which is so different than how our public transport works. Trains are on a rigid schedule. They're going to show up at this minute and we know that if you're in a big city, if you're in New York, you know when the next train is going to show up and when it's going to leave. If you're taking a bus somewhere, there's a Schedule published Jeepneys, which is a very primary form of transportation in the Philippines, are not on schedules. And they have a schedule, but they don't follow it. And if there aren't enough passengers, well, then they're just going to sit there and wait. And my son said, yeah, we had to wait for an hour for the jeepney. And not every time, but yeah, it's not uncommon for that to happen. So when you're talking about scheduling an interview with someone in the Philippines and you're talking about 6am for them or 4am for them, and then you show up five minutes late or they show up five minutes late and you're really upset about them showing up five minutes late because you don't realize that they don't really have a time schedule. They're just not used to this. Then I started talking with my son about time zones and they don't have time zones in the Philippines. There's only one time zone. They've never dealt with a time zone. So when you try and schedule meetings with them, at least in the very beginning, man, this is hard for them. They don't know how time zones work. Not that they're dumb, they just have never had a reason to look at it. And so when they're trying to figure out your time zone and then they're off by an hour, well, that's frustrating for you. And it's frustrating for them and is probably enough for them to say, yeah, I don't want to be embarrassed by this whole thing. And so I'm just not. I'm not going to do this. So hopefully this gives you a different perspective on time in the Philippines. Now, like Julia said, the closer you are to a big city, the closer time schedules are followed. People get strict with time. Also, the closer you get to the big city, the higher the wages. And so if you're looking for someone who is lower wage but similarly skilled, well, you may have to deal with some time issues where they don't follow time schedules. Exactly. Anyway, I thought it was super interesting passing it on. Thanks for listening.
