Free Labor 2: Job Education

Continuing from the last post about free labor, I find another effective way for getting more bang for your buck from your employees is to assign them homework. And I don't just mean doing their work at home, which they should be doing anyway. Under the guise of keeping my employees educated, I make them learn new skills on their own time (and their own dime no less). For example, I hire a programmer and I'll tell them they need to learn html and flash to round out their development skills and make them a more effective employee of the company. But what I actually get is an employee who can double as my webmaster. And the beauty of it is that I can then start asking that employee to start doing the webmaster duties in addition to their programming duties without paying him any more.