A short practical YouTube explainer by John Jonas on benefits employers should offer online Filipino specialists. He lists and explains the 13th month pay (how to prorate it), government programs (PhilHealth, SSS, Pag-IBIG), paid time off policies, and private health insurance/HMO options; he also briefly mentions costs and implementation constraints and plugs his book "The Outsourcing Lever."
Questions this video answers
13th month = (total salary ÷ 12) × number of months worked that year.
Speaker roughly states PhilHealth costs "like $15 a month."
Speaker says it "costs us 4 to $500 per year per employee" (verbal estimate).
Speaker says to pay about $7 for shipping to receive the book.
Chapters
What benefits should you give to your online Filipino specialists? So I often get asked, hey, what benefits should we be giving our workers when we, when we hire them? So there's a bunch of things that you can do and I'm going to explain them to you in this video. So number one is the 13th month and this is the one that they always say is like the most important. If you don't know about the 13th month, check out the article linked below about the 13th month. Super important. Generally, here's how it works. You hire someone in January, in December, you're going to pay them November salary because we always pay after. And then you're going to pay them an extra month of salary called the 13th month. It's not a Christmas bonus and it's a 13th month bonus. In the Philippines, it's legally required that you pay this if you're in the Philippines and hiring Filipino workers because you're not in the Philippines, it's not legally required, but you should still do it. Here's the other thing. It's prorated. So if you hire someone in July and they work for you for six months during the year, so you're going to take the total number their total salary, divide it by 12 and then however many months they worked, you're going to pay them that. That divided by 12 times the number of months. So it's total Salary divided by 12 times Number of months they worked for you. So if they work for you for six months, you're going to pay them half of one month's salary as a bonus the 13th month. So number two, the second option is to pay their PhilHealth. So PhilHealth is a government sponsored health care. It's not really health care and I don't have a lot of experience with this, but every time I've seen it, it seems like they just give discounts on health care at wherever they went to whatever hospital, whatever it is, it's pretty reasonably priced. I want to say like $15 a month. It's something that you can easily add to their salary to have them pay it on their own. You don't need to be paying it. And everybody wants to have PhilHealth in the Philippines. Number three would be SSS. SSS is like their Social Security. It's a amount that they pay into this government program based off of their salary, how much they're making and you can talk to them about how much they make. We have a. You can also check out the article link below where we talk about SSS and PhilHealth. And it'll give you a really good idea of how much they're making and how much they should pay into sss. And you could easily include that amount in their salary. Number four is pag ibig. I don't know how to say this exactly, but it's pag ibig and it is socialized housing lending. So when someone wants a loan for a house, they can go to the government and they have this program where they've paid into it and they can get a loan out of it. It's something that almost everybody wants to pay into, but not everybody does and not everybody needs to. So you can talk to them about if they want. If they want this benefit or if they need this benefit or if they're paying it and it's pretty affordable. Okay, so number. Number four. Well, this is number four. Number five. I don't remember paid time off and holidays. So this is just a basic one. Like my team, when I hire someone, I tell them, you have as much paid time off as you want. I don't care how much time you take off, as long as you get your work done. And then once you've gotten your work and you've proven yourself reliable, you can take off, you can take vacations, you can take sick time. I don't care. I'm still gonna pay you your full salary based off of you've worked. I'm gonna pay you. So I've never had someone take advantage of this. I've seen a lot of other people that are like, oh, you have five days of paid time off per year and you have five sick days. Seen other people give more or less or people not deal with it at all. For me, I don't want to track it. I don't want to have a limit on it. If someone is really struggling, I want them to have their time off. The one thing that I ask for this benefit is I want you to tell me ahead of time. And so like, you're getting married and you're taking time off. Great. I just want to know a few days ahead of time so that I can prepare for it. So the last thing I want to talk about is health care. And this is separate from PhilHealth, which PhilHealth, like I said, is kind of like a discount program. So you can get an actual. They call it an hmo. We call it that too, but so it's an hmo, a private health care that they're going to pay for. And so like our company, we went through Value Care It's a private company. I think it costs us 4 to $500 per year per employee to have them get like 80% coverage for anything. So. And there's quite a few of these options out there. The one thing that we found was we couldn't sign up for it as a company unless we set up an LLC in the Philippines or set up a not even llc, set up a business in the Philippines, which was really, really difficult. So instead what we did was we had them all go through Value Care on their own. We had someone on our team coordinate this with each of them, but then we pay Value Care for each of them individually. And it's a pretty good program and it's pretty affordable, like less than a hundred bucks a month for each person to have full health care coverage. So this benefit is actually one that, like in the US today, it's totally expected. And someone's not going to take a job or not take a job based off it. In the Philippines they are. So if someone doesn't have health care and they get a job with you and you don't provide health care, which is totally acceptable, they're probably going to look somewhere else to see if they can get health care. And so, like I said, this is completely not required. It's optional. But it's a really nice thing to build some really good loyalty from the people that you're hiring. So just to recap the benefits that we give to our people and the options for you are the 13th month. PhilHealth, SSS, POG ebig, paid time off and health insurance. My name is John Jonas and I wrote a book all about hiring people in the Philippines called the Outsourcing Lever, and I'm giving it away for free@outrigourcinglever.com I think if you just pay shipping, $7 for shipping. I think I will ship the book to you. It's about 100 pages long. It'll take you a couple hours to read and you'll know everything you need to know about hiring people in the Philippines. OutsourcingLever.com. Sa.
