Hire the right vendor who truly looks after their staff and who has experience in providing and building a team for you, then you will succeed! Take it from Agility founder and CEO Rob Brough. Here’s the full transcript of what Rob thinks of his Filipino remote workers and how these fantastic teams of hard-working and motivated professionals can help you scale your business, save on costs, and improve productivity.
What characteristics make up fantastic remote teams?
00:00:23
Nia: Hello, we are here with our CEO and founder of Agility Staffing Services, Rob Brough. Hello Rob. [Rob] Hi Nia. [Nia] We are going to be talking about the great people for our business. So you talk about these people that we employ, could you tell us who they are and what we look for?
00:00:41
Rob: Well Nia, I actually call them fantastic people. You know, they’re better than great. So I remember when my business partner said to me many years ago, ‘Look you’ve got to come and help me in the healthcare business (we had at the time). You’re the business guy, I’m the sales guy; come and help.’ And I’ve got to say when I first started full-time in the business, having helped just set it up initially, that I was quite disappointed with the talent that we had in our LA office. I, you know, I don’t want to be too negative but, you know, I felt there’s just so many people who were turning up [that] weren’t really dedicated to the business. They really would just had their hand out, wanting to get paid. And I’ve got to say there was a little bit of turnover in the first few months after I arrived. But, you know, what I found in the Philippines, just about without exception—I can think of in all the years,14 years I’ve been here, I can only think of two people that I cycled out of the business. Two, in all those years. You know, Filipinos want to come to work and they want to do a good job. They come with a very solid background. We’re talking about people that all have college degrees; sometimes two college degrees. You see these highly skilled people, it’s staggering. But, probably looked after just like any environment anywhere in any country, Filipinos really want to go the extra mile for their business. And, you know you’re talking about great English language skills, great empathy, particularly in healthcare where we’ve got a very big specialization in healthcare. So, staff who’re talking to patients, talking to doctors in doctor offices, you know, there’s just great empathy there. And it’s probably one of the reasons why Filipino nurses are hired all over the world, because it’s not only that skill base that they come out of college with, but they have this empathy that patients really appreciate.
So the people here, Nia, educated, dedicated, hardworking, really committed to a good employer and to the client company of that employer. It’s a great pleasure and a privilege to be able to work with people like that. And I’ve said this a few times, I truly just love all my staff and I love the commitment they make to my clients and obviously to ourselves. We do try and, you know, manage and look after people well. And, you know, we’ve got a tiny churn rate because of that. And we see a few people since COVID churning out because they want to work at home, which is sort of a bit sad, and other than that, we lose them only because, ‘Mom’s got cancer and I want to go and look after mom’ or ‘I’m getting married to someone in Canada and I just got my Visa.’ it’s that kind of thing that we lose people for; not because there’s a problem in the work. I know often, you know, the staff say to me, ‘Boss we just love it here,’ because it’s not a toxic work environment that they’ve had in previous companies.
How you can succeed working with offshore remote staff?
Rob: I just can’t praise the dedication and the ability of Filipino people to their jobs enough and, you know, I’m very confident when we hire people for a client that those people are going to perform for that client; that the client will be basically a static about the performance of them.
I had a doctor who I talked to quite a bit over the years and [I] said, ‘Jordan, you know, you should be looking at’—he was always complaining about his US-based staff—and I said, ‘Jordan, you should be looking at putting some people with me in the Philippines.’ And one day he called me up said, ‘Rob, yeah come on, we’ll start with a couple…’ And he called me about two months later, he said, ‘Oh, this is a game changer!’ and I said, ‘Jordan, I’ve been telling you this for years!’ So, you know, he’s got 13 people with us now. You have to, I think, if you hire the right vendor who truly looks after their staff and who has experience in providing and building a team for you, then you will succeed.
If you listen to that experience and that advice and you truly go about being serious and putting the effort in from your country’s side of building this team, you know the management team are behind it; your other employees are behind it; you have a plan that you’ve communicated to your initial employees. [It’s] especially important when you, because you’re chasing margin and you’re worried about going out of business if you don’t get margin, it’s really important to make sure that your onshore team knows the issues, knows the plan, and that you make sure that you keep, I’ve always said, 20% of your staff and, especially, all the trainers—anyone involved in training offshore has to be kept in your onshore team if you’re going about replacing people.
Many times it’s not that… many times it’s just supplementing the initial you know the staff you have in order to get margin. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to lay people off in your home country. But you can rest assured that Filipinos and the work culture, with the right vendor company, will deliver for you and make your business a great success.
What are the various ways to offshore?
Nia: So could you tell me about the various ways of offshoring and what are the differences.
Rob: Yeah, that’s a very good question. There are two main ways to offshore. You can offshore tasks so companies have built around specializing in various areas. So you’re not actually offshoring a job, a role; you’re offshoring certain tasks. Now in the healthcare space that we have a lot of experience in, you know, we see this a lot in Revenue Cycle Management. So certain jobs, certain tasks I should say, within RCM will be offshored to a company specializing in those individual tasks and KPIs are built up around what that means with the provider. The other major area is where you offshore jobs; you’re offshoring roles, not tasks. So you need a person or people to do a role. Let’s say you have your own RCM team and you want to be able to add people to that US-based RCM team and you start building out people in the Philippines around every task area within a work group in RCM. And so you are hiring people who work full-time for you, that you are tasking and managing along with your onshore team. And they’re the two major differences. Now obviously you can get into, you know, smaller niches where you might only be looking at part-time roles. It might be something more similar to hiring someone on Fiverr to do a job for you for a week. It might be employing a virtual assistant to help out. But the two major areas are offshoring tasks and offshoring jobs, people, roles. And that’s the biggest difference and it’s something that a lot of people don’t understand.
How this CEO built his offshore staffing company
Rob: Now when I got started, I was looking to, I wanted to maintain the high level of patient care that we, and also care to our other stakeholders, offices and so forth, and I wanted control of that. So I was always in the market to offshore jobs, roles; not tasks. And I did go and talk to a few companies, three companies. What we were doing was complex, you know, you’re using multiple software systems, you got two screens up at all times. There’s a lot of training work involved, and I wasn’t convinced that I could hire someone to do that for me without spending an inordinate amount of time in order to train their people and I might as well be doing that myself. So that’s the conclusion I came to, and so for me, I set up my own shared services office, I hired people, and I bought over my US trainers and trained everyone.
For some areas like in patient care where we were working with sleep apnea and COPD patients, I’d send one of my RT trainers every three months. I mean it was just continuous training. It’s costly but I wasn’t looking to save every dollar. I was looking, you know for this I was really looking to save money but I saved millions anyway. And I did keep 20% of my staff onshore. So, you know, it depends on your need. Sometimes if you can find a company that can do an element of your RCM really well, okay, that’s something you can do and manage. If you feel, if you’ve got an onshore team and you feel you want to supplement them then it’s probably better to look at finding a good vendor like Agility Staffing in order to be able to build out a team that will work with your team in a very comprehensive way, seamlessly, and be a great success.
How offshore freelancing is different from outsourcing?
Nia: So how does freelancing differentiate with outsourcing?
Rob: Well really, freelancing is a big thing, I mean, I think it just comes from the globalization and we’ve talked, you know in our recent podcast and at other times, about how people are looking to be able to create a better life for themselves and outside of the corporate world, and especially since COVID when there’s been a big push to people wanting to work from home, the global globalization of the the actual talent pool is just massive. I’ve talked before about the Philippines where the amount of talent here is just staggering. And so freelancing is just part of this changing landscape for how people are employed. We see that there’s a lot of freelancing that’s just small jobs, you know, people on on websites like Fiverr, they work to do a task that might take an hour or, you know, maybe a week; it’s not full-time work and people are very happy with that. There’s another whole pool of people that are freelancing and working directly for businesses, particularly small businesses. And you’ve got a massive pool of virtual assistants with all kinds of skills and you find a small business employing one or two people. Those people may be onshore in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada; or they may be based in an offshore country like the Philippines.
When do problems arise when it comes to hiring offshore freelancers?
Rob: The problems starts when small businesses are employing people offshore. It can be easier said than done and there are a lot of legal ramifications both for the employer and the employee. So in the Philippines, for instance, it’s actually illegal to hire somebody from offshore and there’s no relationship between the employer and the employee for tax purposes and for other legal purposes. Many businesses get around this by hiring what’s called an Employer of Record. And they are companies that specialize in legally hiring that individual or individuals, they pay them and ensure all the taxes are paid, and that there is a responsibility to the Philippines’ labor laws. And that way, all of the legal obligations are met. There’s a lot of dubious advice going around. I’ve read things like, ‘Well, if they’re on contract, it doesn’t matter,’ you know. That’s just rubbish. You can get yourself into hot water and, more importantly, the employee can get into hot water. If the Philippines tax office finds that they are receiving money for employment and aren’t paying taxes and, of course, none of the employer related taxes are being paid. So, this is a big issue. It’s much easier, rather than going through the difficulty of finding an Employer of Record and paying them, and then paying them to pay the employee, just simpler to go to a vendor of services offshore and employ that person through a reliable vendor, a reliable outsourcing company like Agility, and there are thousands of others where you won’t have those legal problems.
How have Filipinos adapted to the BPO culture and working a different time zone?
Nia: Could we discuss how Filipinos have adapted well to this BPO culture.
Rob: Yes, it’s one of the main reasons that I first came to the Philippines 14 years ago now. When I was researching where to go, one of the things was [the Philippines was] an easy hop out of LA, I got to admit. But, more importantly, I wasn’t being a pioneer. There are some countries I would have looked at, you know, where you can find quite a number of good graduates with good English, but one, they’re further away, and secondly, you’d be working to establish a new industry. And for the Philippines, when I first came here there was about 1.2 million, I think, it’s about 1.4 million people working in BPOs, you know. 75% of that business is based on US clients so that means everyone’s working night shift to serve those clients. And when you’ve got such a big BPO culture where people have, for many many years, been servicing those US clients having to work night shift, you’re certainly not a pioneer and getting arrows in the back, if you like. So, it was a big reason I came here and you know what I found was what I’d read about that yes, people will readily work these hours. And when I first set up my shared services office here, we were based we had operations across the United States so we had to serve East Coast to West Coast and we set our people to work, working multiple time zones–some people starting earlier, some people starting later in the day in order to be able to do that. And we work all US business days that my business at the time was open. We had very few days where we weren’t open and our employees would work the Philippines’ national holidays, as they needed to, in order to do that. And there were about 30 holidays in the Philippines as you know, Nia. There’s a lot of holidays in the Philippines and they work those; we pay the penalty rates for that holiday work. Where there was a holiday, there weren’t many but where there was a holiday that wasn’t a Filipino holiday, you know, Memorial Day was one in particular, obviously Independence Day is another, the employees would take that off if the business wasn’t working and they wouldn’t get paid for that holiday. So all of my current clients, we operate the same way, whether that be in Australia, New Zealand or the United States, our employees work all business days for the client and the hours of the client sets, whether that be at night time, whether that be starting at 5:00 in the morning to work into sometime in the afternoon for somewhere like New Zealand; a little bit later start for Australia; working night just for the US, they’re the hours that they do. Filipinos regularly do this and are happy to do that in order to be able to have a great job and work for a great company, both for, you know, when I talk about our business and also our client’s business where they’re treated so well and enjoy their jobs.
What are your insights on Filipino communication skills?
Nia: What are your insights on how Filipinos communicate?
Rob: Filipino English is excellent. We find that there are just tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Filipinos that speak really good English. Most have a slight Filipino lilt to their English so, you know, if I’m on the phone with a service provider for an airline or or a bank, and I know straight away that person’s in the Philippines because I can tell with that little lilt in the language. But Filipinos learn English at school so it’s a strong second language for anyone, certainly in a capital city. In the provinces, you know, less so. And when I went looking when I first got started in setting up a shared services office for my own US-based healthcare company, one of the things that attracted me to the Philippines was the standard of English. What I find is that Filipinos who speak the language well [are] also generally are quite acclimated to the United States, particular. There’s a very strong relationship between the US and the Philippines that goes back to the days when the Philippines was an American colony. And there’s a massive diaspora of Filipinos in the United States so culture… culturally, it’s not just the language but the understanding of the culture and the way language is used, particularly for the United States, that really enhances the ability of Filipinos with their English language.
We’ve seen, sometimes I’ve seen videos of Indian call centers, for instance, trying to acculturate their employees who might be serving, say, a UK company. Well, we don’t have to do that in the Philippines. Yes, we do teach some mediums, we do language training but it’s really a small supplement to the natural ability that Filipinos have grown through the education system and any other post-education courses that they’ve taken. So, very strong English language skills, Nia, and it’s very attractive.
More reading: