The work culture in the Philippines

The Spanish say 'Manyana.' I've always felt that given their Spanish ancestry Filipinos have adopted this attitude to life. Perhaps we work too hard in the west.

Filipinos do not seem to be well acquainted with efficiency when it comes to the requirements of collaboration to reach a collective goal.  in fact, they seem to be allergic to it.

as workers responsible for their own output, the majority of them are very hard-working when left alone to do their work independently.

Being someone who has built small agency teams, hired (and fired) many to be part of said team, i can tell you that even just standing in line to order food at any fast food chain and observing 50 team members chaotically run-amuck behind the counters to accommodate and fulfill the request for those who have placed and paid for their orders ahead of yours, is a sore on the eyes. any executive who works in Operations or is responsible for running a team knows exactly what i am talking about.

In terms of working with an Agency team, particularly where there are many inexperienced, younger members:  the reaching of deadlines for deliverables always, without fail, takes a detour with unnecessary extra meetings , internal revision requests, and almost a complete disregard for identified milestones.  This is where someone of a managerial position needs to step in to be fair but firm; they need to be assertive where both time and effort are being poorly wasted,  encourage them to identify what needs to be done, and get those involved back on track.

The work culture stems from the top. There is a pretense about service and that the customer is important. Two examples come to mind where the customer is not respected. Shop at SM and Robinsons. They have many checkout points yet on many occasions there will be one and, if you are lucky, two checkouts operating. The results can be long queues and a wait of 15 to 25 minutes to hand over your many. Why do they do that to customers?

Because there is no real competition in the Philippines. A 'rent seeking' oligopoly of a few large corporations controlled by politically connected ancestral families. The biggest overhead with most retail businesses is labour. Two check-out queues compared to five will have a significant impact on the bottom line.

@Lotus Eater Isn't the cost of labour cheap?

@Gezzar

Yes but its all relative.

The work culture depends on the industry. I know of a very large engineering multinational company that has an office in Manila. Mostly engineers. The behavior is definitely good. Oftentimes, branches from first world countries 'borrow' engineers from the Philippines and other developing countries due to a lot lower burden rate. One time I purchased a pair of pants at SM, but decided I don't want it, definitely, they are hesitant to make the refund. It took a manager and 30 minutes for the refund.

Ditto my earlier post. There are virtually no consumer rights or protection laws in the Philippines because of the concentration of ownership with the powers that be that make the laws. Go figure.

I can only give my "tourist observation" for now, however I had worked with some people and organizations from the Philippines in the past.

Long story short: everything takes unnecessary long, goes in a bit frustrating manner, including for filipinos themselves, but for the most times it's a positive and dopamine increasing experience.

I have an impression that processes and work overall is managed with priority to motivate to work, in a positive or negative way - it's another question, but somehow rarely efficiency is being managed during the process. Sometimes amount of people doing one job and clogging the process by their amount is purely visible. Self-organization without proper training has its limits.

But as I said, I never had negative aftertaste for waiting in a line of 8-10 people to a cashier for 20-30 minutes once I've got to the interacting with all 3 people there at the cashier stand, replying to all 3 in the same time about where, how, in what to pack my groceries, how my contactless card work, am I single, where I live, why there's more fun in the Philippines in my opinion and other questions reviving my good mood and customer satisfaction

I understand that my onions should be cheaper if only one guy processed the whole customer line x3 times faster, or there was an automatic cashier for small purchases, but it wouldn't be authentic experience.

I am currently in Manila. The wife and I were looking to get coffee around the University of Santo Tomas. We chose a local coffee kiosk at 'The ONE Santo Tomas'. They offer brewed coffee and iced coffee. We asked for 2 hot coffees. The lady said they only have iced coffee. She has a pot of brewed coffee right there. We were puzzled since iced coffee is made from brewed coffee. We insisted politely we wanted hot coffee and it is right there. She relented. Iced coffee costs 50% more than hot coffee. I guess ice and sugar cost that much.

@Mickael I am in the Philippines on a marriage-related permanent resident visa (13a), the terms of which prevent me from working here. Which is fine, since our social security income is more than enough to live comfortably. But I can give you a few observations from expat friends who work here.

1. Do not work for a Filipino company. The pay and benefits are much lower than a western professional would expect. Instead, try to get a posting from a western company that will pay a western salary and maybe even some of your living expenses.
2. Owning a business, such as a restaurant, bar, or hotel, is fairly common among working expats. Same thing with farming. But expat employers need to be very careful to follow every employment rule and regulation, such as paying a pro-rated "13th month" salary when you terminate an employee.
3. Most of my working expat friends are frustrated by the work ethic of their employees. They love them, but it seems that local workers are trained to never think for themselves, so they take little to no initiative even when action is clearly needed. When dealing with customers, you will usually hear, "sorry sir", rather than, "let me see what I can do".

I am retired and financially secure so no need to work but I have witnessed plenty of construction work since I've been in country. The workers are able to do precision work with minimal tools. Clear tubing is used as a water level for elevation instead of optical or laser devices. Water levels are very accurate so the end result is acceptable. They also use home made plumb bobs and chalk lines and hammer handles are often a piece of pipe welded to the hammer head which makes the hammer a multi purpose tool since they can bend rebar with the handle. The foreman used a 60 cm floor tile to square the corners of the in law's bungalow. I watched the carpenter that hung our doors cutting complex dove tailed miter joints with a handsaw and wood chisel.

The workers that are considered skilled and receive higher wages all have basic welding skills and can do carpentry and plumbing but their masonry skill is what impresses me the most.

I am retired and financially secure so no need to work but I have witnessed plenty of construction work since I've been in country. The workers are able to do precision work with minimal tools. Clear tubing is used as a water level for elevation instead of optical or laser devices. Water levels are very accurate so the end result is acceptable. They also use home made plumb bobs and chalk lines and hammer handles are often a piece of pipe welded to the hammer head which makes the hammer a multi purpose tool since they can bend rebar with the handle. The foreman used a 60 cm floor tile to square the corners of the in law's bungalow. I watched the carpenter that hung our doors cutting complex dove tailed miter joints with a handsaw and wood chisel.
The workers that are considered skilled and receive higher wages all have basic welding skills and can do carpentry and plumbing but their masonry skill is what impresses me the most.
-@Moon Dog

There are so many Filipino contruction workers that have their own way af acheiving amazing results.

@Lotus Eater True

@Moon Dog

Amen to your observations and comments on Filipino workmanship. Being a lifelong Jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none, I notice a host of things every day that 'normal' people have no interest in; and these guys are truly amazing.

And.... they are not alone, by any means. Having become weary of phony drama, senseless hubris and all the foibles of mankind that are running rampant today on TV, a few years ago I said bye-bye to Dish Network and DirecTV and anything that comes out of Hollywood and said hello to YouTube, where I get to pick what interests me, with a minimum of commercials. I've found an astounding offering of ordinary Joes like me, simply doing what they enjoy and filming it. I'll never get it all watched; I don't want to wear out the word 'amazing' so I'll just say I can re-live most of what I've done in my life, by watching others doing it their way, sometimes right, sometimes ass-backwards, but almost always enjoyable. From the little Japanese gal named Linguoer, small and thin, who rewinds electric motors weighing the same as she does, even bigger, refurbishing all manner of stuff from scrap yards, the garbage or some mountainside sheep farmer, to the guys in India tearing a Caterpillar Diesel engine apart and rebuilding it out in a dirt road or street, to Andrew Camarata of upstate New York, going from a teenager mowing lawns to a guy who built a castle out of shipping containers, bought a huge collection of construction equipment, fixed it, and uses it to amaze an ever-growing audience of people like me, to the tune of somewhere between a million and maybe 3 million bucks a year income, all from YouTube benefits. There are hundreds of creative, imaginative and clever ordinary Good Ol' Boys out there that are allowing folks like us to get a fulfilling and enjoyable helping of Normalcy, while we try to survive a world gone nuts. Alas, I rant.... sorry.  Not really.

My Filipina wife and I recently moved into our new house here in Dumaguete, which we discovered for sale while it was under construction, so we got to witness a significant part of it being built. The builder, a local Filipino businessman, a one man show (unsurprisingly amazing in his own right) now has his 9-man crew building his own new house next door to us. I've been hearing a lot of thumps from that direction lately, so today I investigated and found them compacting very damp soil in what will become the master bedroom, using a 3" diameter 6-foot long, fairly straight tree limb with a solid concrete cylinder about a foot in diameter on one end to do the job. The room is laid out with strings in a grid pattern, so the end result will no doubt be level after the concrete is mixed, manually, on site (our floors are the straightest I've ever seen). We call that Hillbilly Ingenuity back where I was raised (in the Missouri Ozarks). I'm sure they have a Visayan term with the same meaning.... They take it much farther than just ingenuity--and everything I've seen them build in this neighborhood is straight, level and square, not to mention secure and solid.

I agree with your assessment of their masonry skill. In the US, you'd be hard pressed to find any non-textured plastered wall as immaculately straight, flat and smooth as the walls in our rooms are. And even though they are never in a hurry, it is amazing how fast they get things done (who knows how many hours a day they work....). And for a small fraction of what construction workers are making there. My hat's off to these guys, to say the least.

This is only one of many amazing things I've discovered here, the most amazing of which is how the traffic is a genuine free-for-all, a big mixed stew of all sizes and shapes of objects--including men, women, children and babies--flowing as a liquid; with a thousand potential sideswipes, head-on collisions and pedestrian hit and runs a minute. Yes, this is a truly amazing place. I won't venture into my feelings about Red Tape and Bureaucracy on Steroids (be still, my mouth.... be patient instead....} A real Test....  DM

@TitoDan Great story, thanks. I've learned a lot from YouTube also. I took a HVAC course so I could service heat pumps on the rental units I owned in Georgia but I learned how it is really done by watching Steve Lavimoniere's YouTube videos.

It is interesting how the workers here use monofilament as a guide when they plaster the walls or set tile. 

Yes!  And on all the vertical corners of everything.  Never have I seen that done before.  They have honed their skills to a razor sharp edge--like their corners--and they are working for crumbs compared to far less skilled US masons.   Gotta say 'amazing' again.......    DM