“Great talent has options. If we want to attract top Filipino professionals and keep them, we can’t just say we’re a good employer. We needed an independent body to confirm it.”
Anna Tobillo · CEO, TeamUp Remote Talent Staffing
Company size
Small, 30 to 99 employees, based in the Philippines under a U.S. parent company
Segment
Remote staffing, placing Filipino virtual assistants and support professionals with home care agencies across the United States
Recognition
Great Place To Work® Certified™, Philippines, June 2026, on its first survey
TeamUp had the machinery for listening. Pulse surveys. Coaching sessions where employees were encouraged to raise concerns and put suggestions directly to a supervisor or HR.
Turnover, absenteeism and participation in company activities, all tracked. Every one of those channels worked on the same condition: somebody had to decide to speak first.
In June 2026 the company earned Certification in the Philippines on its first Trust Index™ Survey, with 97% of employees saying it is a great place to work, against 65% at a typical Philippine company. TeamUp treats that score as confirmation. It treats what the survey revealed about its own listening habits as the more useful finding.
The company places Filipino virtual assistants and support professionals with home care agencies across the United States, covering scheduling, recruitment, sales, customer service, billing, payroll and administrative support. Its product is care delivered from the other side of the world. Earning Certification at home was a test of whether TeamUp practiced that care on its own team first.
“TeamUp was built on a belief before it was ever a company: Filipino professionals deserve access to opportunities their geography has kept out of reach. Getting certified in the Philippines wasn’t a marketing move. It was proof that the malasakit we ask our remote team members to bring to US home care agencies every day is something we practice inside our own team first.”
Anna Tobillo · CEO, TeamUp Remote Talent Staffing
Malasakit is the Filipino word for a care that runs past obligation, the kind you extend because the person in front of you matters, rather than because the job description says so. It is the thing TeamUp sells to American home care agencies. It is also, on the evidence of the survey, the thing it had been running on internally without a way to measure.
Here is where the first year landed.
97%
Say TeamUp is a great place to work
Measured against 65% at a typical Philippine company, on the company’s first survey.
14 days
Average time to hire
Down from 30 days as the employer brand strengthened, more than halving the wait to fill a role.
90%
Of supervisory roles filled internally
Leadership and supervisory vacancies now go to existing employees as the default route.
The Challenge: Feedback That Only Reached the Confident
TeamUp’s account of the years before Certification is unusually direct about its own limits. In its Culture Audit™ the company writes that the feedback it collected “was often anecdotal and dependent on individual conversations. Employees who were more comfortable speaking up were more likely to share their experiences, while others may have chosen to remain silent.”
What followed from that was an organization with no consistent way to measure trust, no way to compare experience between departments or employee groups, and no reliable read on trends across the whole company. A manager running a warm team and a manager running a cold one produced the same signal, which was quiet.
The assumption underneath it
One line in the Culture Audit does more work than any other in the document.
“One of our biggest blind spots was assuming that the absence of complaints meant employees were satisfied.”
At TeamUp’s size, where a founder can plausibly know everyone’s name, that assumption feels safe. It is also impossible to disprove using the methods TeamUp had, because every one of them required an employee to raise a hand first. Silence read as contentment when it could equally have read as caution, or as a new hire deciding this was not the week to say something.
A company adding distance to itself
The timing made it harder. TeamUp’s remote team members already work at a distance from the American agencies they support. Parts of the internal team then moved to hybrid arrangements, splitting the week between office days and home. Employees in different departments and different work setups had few reasons to cross paths outside their own tasks, so the informal channels that carry culture in a small company had less to travel on.
The Solution: Structured Listening, Then Structured Talking
TeamUp ran the survey, then built two standing rituals off what came back. The survey gave every employee an equal and confidential chance to describe their experience, which was the point of running it. Leadership reviewed the results in detail, looked for themes repeating across departments, and prioritized the issues with the widest reach into daily work.
The single biggest insight, in the company’s own words, was that employees valued consistent communication, recognition and transparency as highly as they valued compensation and benefits. Trust was being built or lost in ordinary interactions rather than in policy. TeamUp had believed it was communicating well. The survey showed room to strengthen two-way communication and to explain the reasoning behind management decisions.
“We believe that collecting feedback only creates value when it is followed by meaningful action.”
Quarterly town halls, launched April 2026
Employees wanted clearer sight of company direction, business performance and organizational change. Updates had been travelling outward through managers, which produced different versions of the same news in different departments. Since April 2026, senior leadership has run a company-wide town hall every quarter covering performance, priorities, upcoming initiatives and operational changes, with employees putting questions straight to leadership in the room.
Monthly engagement activities
HR runs a monthly program of celebrations, wellness initiatives, team-building events, recognition programs and company-wide campaigns, started in 2026. Participation is monitored and feedback is gathered after the larger activities to shape the next round. The brief was specific: give employees across departments and work arrangements a reason to interact that has nothing to do with their own workload.
Every other Friday
On a two-week cycle TeamUp runs pulse surveys alongside mental wellness and engagement sessions, including the ones it calls Move, Break and the Annual Meet-Up. All full-time employees have HMO coverage. The fortnightly rhythm keeps the listening continuous, so the annual survey confirms a picture the company has already been watching rather than delivering one it has never seen.
Leaders who stay reachable
Around the town halls sit department meetings, one-on-one conversations and informal check-ins. Team leaders at TeamUp are held to more than performance management. They are expected to run regular check-ins, recognize individual and team achievements, give timely guidance, and build collaboration into how their teams work. The open door is stated policy, and leaders use it to hear about operational problems early.
The Results: A Hiring Advantage and a Promotion Pipeline
Certification moved TeamUp’s recruiting numbers first. The company reports that its average time to hire has improved from 30 days to 14, allowing it to fill critical positions faster while holding its hiring standard. TeamUp features the Certification in its recruitment campaigns and employer branding, on its social media accounts and on the job boards it posts to, so candidates meet the independent result before they apply.
Developing people already inside the company has become the default route into leadership. TeamUp reports that since it focused on career development, 90% of leadership and supervisory vacancies have been filled through internal promotion.
On the survey itself, Great Place To Work Philippines records that 97% of employees at TeamUp Remote Talent Staffing say it is a great place to work, against 65% at a typical Philippine company, a gap of 32 percentage points.
The result TeamUp names as its proudest is the evenness underneath that number: “Regardless of tenure, department, or role, employees expressed a strong sense of trust, respect, and belonging within our organization.”
For a company running office, hybrid and fully remote arrangements side by side, an even result across groups is the harder thing to produce.
Business Impact
What Certification changed commercially
- Certification carried into recruitment campaigns, employer branding, social accounts and job boards
- Internal promotion is now the default route into supervisory roles, cutting external search cost
- Voluntary and involuntary turnover tracked alongside absenteeism and activity participation
- Quarterly town halls replaced manager-relayed updates with one consistent company-wide brief
- A lean structure supported by AI funds above-industry pay rather than thinly spread headcount
People Impact
What changed in the day-to-day
- Every employee now has a confidential, standardized way to report their experience
- Trust, respect and belonging reported consistently across tenure, department and role
- Employees ask leadership questions directly at every quarterly town hall
- Monthly engagement activities plus wellness and pulse sessions every other Friday
- HMO coverage extended to all full-time employees
What Comes Next: Malasakit Past the Founders
Asked what worries her about the next two years, Anna Tobillo says:
“It’s scaling malasakit past founder-led culture, and three things are colliding to make that harder in the next two years.”
The first is growth. Every new client agency means remote team members arriving faster than Anna and co-founder Angie Flores-Llenas can personally settle them in the way they used to.
“Right now, when someone is struggling, one of us usually hears about it directly and handles it the way we’d want handled if it were us. That doesn’t scale past a certain headcount. The instinct has to live in team leaders who weren’t there when we started the company, and it has to show up the same way whether someone joined in month one or month forty.”
The second is hybrid work, which puts two layers of distance where there used to be one. TeamUp’s remote team members already sit far from their agency clients. Now part of the internal team is split between office days and home as well.
“A new hire used to absorb ‘how we do things here’ just by sitting near people who’d been here longer. That doesn’t happen automatically anymore. We have to build it on purpose, through structured touchpoints instead of proximity.”
The third is AI, and Anna’s read on it is more specific than most. Work that took days now takes hours, and that speed is deliberate. Running lean is how TeamUp pays above industry standard rather than stretching a bigger headcount across the same ground. Her concern sits one level down from the tool.
“AI can clear the mechanical work off someone’s plate. It can’t do the noticing. The challenge is making sure our people stay the ones who notice, not the ones who just approve what the tool suggests.”
For a company whose entire proposition is people who notice things on behalf of an agency owner eight thousand miles away, that is the right thing to be watching.
“The hard part across all three isn’t writing a new policy for each one. It’s making sure care still feels like care when the company is bigger and the team is more spread out.”
Anna Tobillo · CEO, TeamUp Remote Talent Staffing
Where Culture Work Starts
Certification did not change what TeamUp believed about its own culture. It changed what the company could prove to a candidate and, more usefully, what it could see about itself. The pulse surveys and the coaching conversations are still running. They now sit alongside a measure that reaches the people those channels never did, which is the whole point of running one.
If your read on employee sentiment depends on who feels comfortable speaking up, you are measuring confidence rather than culture. The survey is how you find out which one you have been looking at.
Talk to Great Place To Work Philippines about the Trust Index Survey and Certification
