The most common and reasonable way to pay workers in construction and finishing. “How much you worked is how much you earned.” For piecework payment, you need to have clear rates and the work must be measurable numerically: so many cubic meters of concrete, so many square meters of drywall.
When you calculate a detailed estimate for an object, you have all this data, and you can use it when negotiating with workers. When we were doing apartment renovations, my partner simply gave the workers an estimate with the volumes and types of work, removing the rates for the items from it, leaving only the resulting amount. Or he set the rates that we considered reasonable in order to agree them with the workers.
For simple types of work, such as installing siding, this is even easier: there is an agreed price per square, there is a calculated area.
The salary has a number of disadvantages that make it unreasonable in most cases. If you pay a person a fixed salary that does not depend on how well they work, then this will corrupt the person. There are, however, exceptions.
First, there are people who always work the same way. This often applies to people over 50, of the old school. Their upbringing and ideological core do not allow them to slack off and slack off. Their conscience will eat them up later.
The second exception is handymen, who may well be students (see the description of this type above). They do not know how to do anything, so it makes sense to put them on types of work that cannot be quantified.