Working across time zones with the Philippines
RemoteHire.ph2 min read
The Philippines is on GMT+8 all year. There is no daylight saving time, which removes the twice-yearly hour that quietly breaks recurring meetings everywhere else.
Who overlaps with a normal Philippine day
Take a nine to five in Manila:
- Australia and New Zealand: most of the day, most of the year.
- Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Perth: the same hours.
- India: the afternoon.
- Europe: the Philippine afternoon is the European morning. A 15:00 Manila call is 09:00 in London and 10:00 in Berlin.
- US west coast: no overlap during Philippine office hours. This is the one that needs a decision.
Working US hours is normal here
A large number of Filipino freelancers work a night shift on purpose, and say so. Somebody starting at 21:00 Manila is starting at 06:00 in New York and 09:00 the previous day in Los Angeles: a full American working day.
That is a real and common arrangement rather than a favour, and it is worth stating in a job post if it is what you need. It is also worth not assuming: plenty of people here work daytime hours and are excellent, and asking is one sentence.
What the platform shows you
A profile states the hours a week somebody wants, and, if they have told us, the window they work in and how flexible it is. Below that, after the page loads in your browser, it works out the overlap with your own day and says it in plain words. That arithmetic is over two stated nine-to-fives; it is never a claim about hours nobody gave us.
Time entries store a local time and the zone it was claimed in, rather than a single instant, so a week of hours reads correctly on both clocks and a daylight-saving change somewhere else cannot silently move an agreed hour.
Three habits that make the gap disappear
- Write more than you think you need to. The cost of a misunderstanding is a day, not five minutes.
- Agree one overlapping hour, not a meeting culture. One reliable hour beats four vague ones.
- Say when you will reply, not that you will. "Tomorrow morning my time" is a fact. "Soon" is not.
The problem with a time zone is rarely the hours. It is the round trips.