24 Nov 2025 · 3 min
John Jonas walks through converting an online Filipino specialist from hourly to salary. The monthly amount stays the same, holidays and PTO are included unless you say otherwise, and you shift from tracking hours to measuring output. Salaried pay usually reduces worker stress and gives them the stability they want.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with online Filipino specialists OFS. This is episode 227, transitioning in OFS from hourly to Salaried. So I recently got this email from Anna who asked me about change. So she says, do you have any tips about transitioning an hourly VA to salary? And she continues, I've never paid salary before. I'm not sure what expectations are, what is included? What are the extras? For example, are holidays included? What about vacation time? What happens if she asks for a few extra days off? How do you manage productivity without knowing the hours as measurement? So here's my answer to this. And the reality is nothing has to change except that now you're paying her the same amount each month regardless of how many hours she works. Are holidays included? Yes, holidays are now included. And the Philippines has a bunch of holidays. Vacation time? Well, yeah, you can give a specific number of vacation days a year and you can track it. Or you can do what we do and we say, look, you can take whatever vacation time you want. We just want to know ahead of time. I've never had someone take advantage of this. What if she asked for a few extra days off? Well, good. You're making her life better and she doesn't have to worry about not working. Working hourly is stressful. Like if you're not working well, you're not getting paid, you're not supporting your family, which means you can't take time off, you can't take a vacation, you can't relax ever. It's just always high stress. How do you measure productivity without the hours for the measurement? Well, you already know how productive she is because you've been working with her based on how much she's done in the hours she's worked. Now, if you go to salary, well, you have a pretty good idea of how many hours she's supposed to be working. You have a pretty good idea of what that output looks like. And it's not that hard to tell. Are you being productive or not? Has it increased? Has it changed? Has it decreased? Did you see a big drop in productivity? Well, then something is wrong. And whether or not she's tracking her hours doesn't really matter. You know something's wrong and you can approach them with, hey, what's wrong? Why is your productivity dropped? There are no tax changes to make for you. You don't have to start including benefits. You don't have to do SSS or Poggy Big or insurance. You don't have to do any of those things. You could, but you could also do those for an hourly person. So does switching from salary or from hourly to salary have to be complicated? No. Yes, holidays are going to be included now, but you could say no to holidays. Yes, paid time off is going to be included now. Pretty simple. Or you could say, sorry, there's no paid time off, and you could deduct from their salaries if they take days off if you really wanted to. In the end, this can be really simple. And frankly, most, not all, but most Filipinos will prefer a salaried payment over an hourly payment just because of the stability it brings to their life.
