John Jonas (OnlineJobs.ph) explains his company’s unlimited paid time off policy for online Filipino specialists: they offer unlimited PTO, do not track hours or days off, and pay a fixed monthly salary. He argues this reduces payroll overhead, relies on productivity and trust (daily Basecamp check-ins and task assignments), and works because employees generally don’t abuse it; exceptions include continuous customer support shifts and the company-wide Christmas–New Year period. He notes raises are performance-based, asks employees to notify planned time off when possible, and highlights recruitment and retention benefits.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with your OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 347, how unlimited PTO works with our OFS. So, a couple episodes ago, I talked about paid time off and benefits, and I got a lot of questions about how we do unlimited pto, and so I want to talk about this. So at onlinejobs ph, we offer unlimited pto, we don't track it, and. And we don't really care. And the biggest reason I started with unlimited PTO is because I didn't want to track it and I didn't really care. So I know this isn't for everyone because a lot of you do care and you do want to track it, and you're concerned that you're not getting the most out of the person that you hired or whatever it is. This is just how we do it. So let me talk through some stuff. So some of you guys are wondering, how can my business afford unlimited pto? Or how do I get maximum productivity out of an OFS when they know they can take as much time off as they want? Or how can I keep track of things when they're able to take whatever time off whenever? So let me answer some of these questions. How can your business afford to offer unlimited pto? Well, first of all, I've never had someone take advantage of it. They've never taken an exorbitant amount of time off. So I pay my team a monthly salary. I don't add or subtract from their salary. If they don't work certain hours or if they work extra on a holiday, or if they work on weekends, I don't pay them less. If. If they don't work on weekdays, we just pay the same amount regardless, and we expect them to get their work done like, well, basically any business in the US does, then it actually saves us time and money in doing payroll. Now, I don't do payroll. My business partner does it, but he sends the same amount to everybody every month. It doesn't change. And so there's no coordinating. There's no time cards. There's, there's. His time is the most valuable thing. And so dealing with tracking paid time off would cost us more money than it would save us. Which now leads me to question number two, which is how do I get maximum productivity from my OFS if they can take whatever time off they want? So for me, I personally value productivity more than the amount of time it looks like you spent working? So if you can finish your work within an eight hour shift, that's great. If you can finish your work in five hours, that's great. I want to keep people busy because if you don't keep people busy, they'll go looking for other jobs and then usually their productivity suffers. But if their productivity doesn't suffer and we can make their lives better and they're still getting the work done and I feel like I'm getting good value out of it, well, that's pretty good for me. And so if they want to take time off and get their work done outside of that, they want to work extra one day and work less another day, I don't really care as long as the work gets done. I'm not concerned about maximizing every second of productivity in someone's life. Now, I do have regular communication with them. I communicate with them every day through our project management system basecamp. They check in, I get check ins from them every day, which is a daily report. I also assign tasks in basecamp. And so if they finish their work and they have more tasks assigned, well, then they should continue working. And they know that. And then we all understand that we're part of a business process. We have a business culture together. We want to solve problems. Everybody wants to help solve problems on my team. And so they understand that there's more to do. And so sometimes they'll assign themselves tasks and they'll get that work done. Now, are they taking paid time off every day? Probably not. Especially not if there's work to be done. They're not slacking off because they can. They want to contribute, they want to help the business. They don't want to feel like they're taking advantage of the business and they don't want to feel like they're a slacker. But when the work is done, I don't mind if they take the time off. Usually they don't do it because they just try and take on more responsibilities. So why does it work like this way? For me, I'm not really sure. I try and treat people well. I try and pay people well. Do you give annual raises? And they know that those annual raises are based on performance. Now we don't do a performance review or anything formal like that. At the end of the year, we give raises. And if people are really great, we give bigger raises. And they know that we're going to give bigger raises if people are really great. So the last thing to talk about is how do I keep track of things if they have unlimited paid time Off. Do I keep track of their paid time off? No, I don't. I don't track it at all. In fact, sometimes I'll wonder, wonder why something didn't happen today. And then I'll go back and look and say, oh yeah, that person's on vacation. They told me that last week. They told me they were going to go on vacation. So that makes sense. But did I track that? No. Did I even remember they were gone? No, because I trust them to get their work done. So how we handle this is we ask them to tell us ahead of time before taking time off if they can. If they're gonna go on vacation, let us know ahead of time. If they have something for their kids or for school, let us know ahead of time. If they're sick, just let us know as soon as you can. If there's an emergency, let us know as soon as you can. We're not super concerned about always knowing ahead of time, but the more ahead of time we can know, the better. It also helps for us that we don't have a lot of time sensitive tasks. We don't have clients with deadlines. And so we allow people to get their work done when they get it done. The one exception to that is customer support, where we expect customer support to be answered 24 7. And so we have provided enough people that if someone's going to miss their shift, they can coordinate to get someone else to cover and then they can cover someone else's shift later on. So then in addition to this paid time off, we also give typically the week of Christmas off, between Christmas and New Year's completely off. Now we ask people to check their email in case something goes on. Customer support team can't completely take it off because we still have customer support to take care of, but it's much less for us during that week. And so they can take much, they can work much less, but that's still paid time off the week of Christmas to New Year's. And that's pretty much how PTO works for us. It keeps our employees happy, it makes life easy for us. It makes us attractive when we're recruiting people because they know that they're going to get more than five days off per year. And then we get a lot of productivity out of people because they want to continue to work for us. So then I'd love to hear your PTO strategy. Do you do unlimited pto? Do you have a specific amount? Do you keep track of it? How do you keep track of it? What do you do to make this easier for yourself rather than a burden. Let me know. Johnlinejobs phone.
