24 Nov 2025 · 6 min
John Jonas discusses what to do when your salaried OFS has completed all assigned work. Paying a salary forces you to delegate and find more tasks, which can actually help your business grow. He shares tips like asking about other skills they have, reassigning work, and soliciting their ideas for what else needs doing.
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 336. My OFS ran out of things to do. So one of my team members recently got a message from a graphic designer friend of hers, and the message was in Filipino, but it roughly translates to I just want to share. My client is amazing. He pays me a minimum salary even when I don't have tasks. Thank you for introducing me to onlinejobs.ph. this is a big help for me, especially with today's inflation. So there were a couple things to unpack here. Number one, I'm really glad that this person has a job where they can support their family. Not having to jump from one thing to the next to the next is a really big deal. And a lot of the work in the Philippines is temporary. Six months or so, and then your contract is up, and then you have to go find another job or working on upwork or fiverr is like that, where you don't know today if you're going to have work tomorrow, and. And so you're just constantly hustling. So now, the other side of this, the other thing I wanted to unpack is this employer still pays him a minimum salary even if he doesn't have work for him to do. Well, that means that sometimes this employer is paying for nothing. Now, some of you will see this as an argument for doing freelance work or hourly work, where if they're not working, then you don't pay them. But I want to offer a different perspective, and there are a couple reasons why. And I have done what this employer does, and I've seen quite a few other people do it. The first reason might be just because it's easier. It's easier to just pay the salary and have that person at your disposal whenever you need them, rather than. Rather than taking the chance of them going and getting another job or saying, oh, I'm just freelance work, so I have this one thing to do. Even though I know I'm gonna have something next week, I don't have something tomorrow, so I'm not gonna be concerned with you and you can go and find another job. Now, if that person goes and gets another job and is not available next week, well, now that's really, really painful as an employer, when you've found someone who's really good and you find someone else, especially if it's because you didn't pay them to continue working for you. Now, not every situation is like this, and it's not really sustainable long term, but another reason why you might do this, and it really becomes problematic because if you don't keep them busy full time, then the chances of them going out and looking for another job are high. And so even if you're paying them to stick with you, they will. But they'll probably go find another job to fill their time, because everybody has to fill their time when they get another job, work can suffer. That other employer may be keeping them really busy. And then when you have work for them to do, they'll try and get your work done, but they have other responsibilities now of more reliable work. There are reasons for paying even if you're not keeping them busy full time. But there's a better solution than just paying and not having them work. Let's try and get that person busy full time. So here are a couple thoughts. The first thing I do when I have someone that is not busy full time is I ask them, hey, what else do you think you could do? And I'll use my graphic designer, Elijah as an example. I asked Elijah, what else? What other talents do you have? What other things do you think you could do for our business? Where do you think we are lacking and how can you contribute? His response was, oh, I. I'm also pretty good at editing videos. So I hired him as a designer, but he said, oh, I'm also pretty good at editing videos. So I started having him edit videos and it turned out he was really good at it. And now he edits all of my videos and podcasts and he has another video editor who he is teaching to be really, really good like him. So the next question I asked him was, what other ideas do you have that could improve our business? And it turned out he had quite a few. Now, we didn't implement every one of them, but some of them we did. And that was really, really great. And I could give the work to him when he wasn't busy doing graphic design work or video editing. Now he's too busy. But in the beginning, that was one of the questions I asked him and it really showed that he was paying attention, that he wanted the business to improve, that he wanted to contribute. My next tip is to look at something that you can get off of your plate now with a graphic designer or a video editor. Maybe there's not something that I'm currently doing that he's talented at, but if, if I had something that he could do that maybe might fill some of his time, even if it's data entry work, that's still pretty reasonable for him to do data entry work. It's probably not the best use of his time for me, but it's. It's doable. Also, sometimes I'll just ask him for his input and perspective on things that are completely unrelated because he thinks differently than I do. He's a creative person and I'm not. And getting his input on things is really, really helpful sometimes. So I know that it's really tempting to say, oh, I'm just going to hire hourly, or I'm just going to hire freelance because I don't have enough work to keep that person busy full time. But hiring full time will make all the difference in the world to your business and to the person you hire. When you can pay a salary to someone, you make a commitment to them that you're going to take care of them. You also make a commitment to yourself that you are going to get your business to a point where that person needs to be busy full time, which means you're committing to yourself to grow your business. Now, obviously there are situations where hourly or freelance work is appropriate. Most of the time, though, I think most business owners will be better off by paying a salary. I almost always find that paying a salary forces a business owner to step away, stop working in the business and to work on the business. To step away from being the grunt worker to being more of the CEO. So if you have an OFS that's working hourly for you right now, maybe consider asking them to go full time. Even if you don't think you have enough work for them to do, find one more thing that they can work on and see if they're willing to go full time and see how that starts to change your thinking in your business.
