The economy in the Philippines is in a state of transition, moving from being based on agriculture to services and manufacturing. The role of IT is playing a vital part in the transformation of the Filipino economy. As businesses all over the world look to continue with a remote working model, access to information technology is allowing the Philippines to embrace the possibilities of remote working.
The Rise of Remote Working
2020 saw a huge shift in the way that businesses were operating, as the COVID-19 pandemic made it unsafe for people to continue working on site. Initially, the response to the move to remote work had a lot of business owners concerned. Few people were aware of the effects that rapid adoption of a remote working model would have on productivity and efficiency rates. Any concerns about this were soon shown to be unfounded.
Studies have shown that far from hurting businesses, remote working offers a number of distinct benefits. Remote working has bought an increase in productivity and efficiencies for businesses across a range of different sectors. This is why big companies like HSBC and JP Morgan are looking to continue with a remote working model full time.
The rise of remote working has not only benefited businesses due to an increase in efficiency. As businesses are looking to adopt a remote working model full-time, their possibilities for talent acquisition are hugely increased. Suddenly, business owners are no longer restricted by geographical contrasts and can hire talent from across the world. One country, in particular, that is benefiting from this remote model is the Philippines.
A New Model for US Companies
A lot of the Filipino IT and IT-related industry growth is rocket-fuelled by the recent events in the US in particular. Many states on the west coast aren’t’ too far away from the Philippines in terms of the time difference, so in this new era of global remote working, Filipino IT services are an affordable source of digital labor for many American companies, especially start-ups.
This means that Filipino workers are thrown into a complex business network and typically have to liaise with many different people in many different places during a business day. For example, US companies tend to prefer to get server services and hardware support in the US because of the time-zone similarities as well as uptime records, so a Filipino worker will often talk with a start-up CEO in Silicon Valley, an IT Support company in Baltimore, and a server maintenance company in Nevada all in the same hour. This is why excellent English language skills in the Philippines are so important – they often have to effectively navigate through different accents and lingo.
The rise of remote working has increased possibilities for both businesses and individuals, as both can benefit from increased talent potential. However, in order for both workers and businesses to be able to benefit from remote working, they first need access to IT solutions. Without dedicated IT solutions, international remote working would be impossible.
