Do your offshore staff in the Philippines seem to be sick more often than you would expect?
Sunday morning, Manila – I wake up with a splitting headache.
Due to a series of unforeseen circumstances the night before, I’d found myself in a jeepney from Marikina heading towards Pasay, trying to get to Makati.
Traffic in Manila is like a force of nature at the best of times. It was dark, raining, there’d been a local festival and street march. Cars, buses, trucks – gridlock.
All up, I spent about five hours in total breathing traffic smog – you can actually see it sitting as a brown murk up to two meters off the roadway.
Hence the headache. So if the staff you use for remote work are commuting, sometimes as much as 2.5 hours one way, and are frequently absent on sick leave or complain of headaches and flu-like systems, are sleepy and lethargic, or seem vague or confused, chances are they have carbon monoxide poisoning.
While we can’t solve the problems of traffic and pollution directly, at Bricoleur Technologies, our default mode of operation is as a distributed company, so our staff work from home.
