Here is an alarming new stat for you, as increasingly, some remote employees are secretly working multiple jobs!! A recent study found 38% of remote workers regularly do their job from bed. What that study didn’t mention was that they might be actually doing multiple jobs from bed.
The latest WFH trend is doing extra work secretly.
A recent report from The Wall Street Journal details folks secretly taking on multiple jobs, toggling between Slack accounts and work calendars, and using excuses like WiFi issues to balance responsibilities and earn up to 3x of their annual salary in any one position!
Some folks are emboldened by a site called Overemployed, which oversees a Discord community and provides tips for multi-jobbers. Overemployed hosts articles with titles like “How to Set Low Expectations At Your Two Remote Jobs” and “Manage Conflicting Meetings With Two Remote Jobs.”
But the craziest claim comes from an anonymous poster on Hacker News who reportedly works 10 remote engineering jobs simultaneously.
“The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for
underperformance I can coast about 4-8 weeks before a given job fires me,” they wrote.
The user says they are headed for $1.5m in compensation this year.
A) If I’m one of his 10 employers, I’m asking our GC to contact the other companies and file a class-action lawsuit against this scammer, as he’s betraying the trust of every employer. I’d claw back all of his compensation and go after him for fraud.
B) This is the classic example of employers focused more on output from every role, vs. outcomes the talent creates in the role. Bottom line, if employees want to goof off (or commit fraud in this case), they’ll do it however they can. The sooner you interview adults, expect adulting behaviors, and focus on the outcomes people create (read: quantifiable value, business results, improved conditions) vs. reports, presentations, or much of the wasted efforts in our organizations on a daily basis, the sooner you’ll create self-organized, self-managed, highly entrepreneurial teams whose metrics and compensation are directly tied to their individual and collective outcomes.
How do you feel about an employee working multiple full-time jobs at the same time? David Nour