Working from home

‘Double dipping’: why managers worry that staff have a

second job on the sly

There is growing concern that remote workers are offering their services elsewhere

Pilita Clark 4 HOURS AGO

Thanks to Covid, my normal working day is generally spent at my desk

in the office, or at the computer on my kitchen table, or somewhere in
between.

Wherever I am though, I can’t remember ever thinking I could take

advantage of this freedom to work remotely to get another full-time job
on the sly.

Now I have, thanks to a conversation I had last week with Anthony

Klotz, the American academic who coined the Great Resignation phrase
during the pandemic and is now at University College London’s school
of management.

He told me that when he had been speaking to large audiences of

managers over the past six months, one of the most common concerns
they raised was about remote workers secretly taking on a second job.
“It is one of the main three questions that comes up,” he said.

The managers weren’t talking about part-time side hustles, or a bit of

brief moonlighting, or the back-breaking multiple jobs that poorly paid
workers are forced to take on.

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 They were worried that remote workers had craftily taken on another
full-time, white collar, salaried job — on top of the one they were
already being paid to do.

Klotz is just a sample of one but there is evidence the executives he was
talking to are far from alone.

A sizeable 16 per cent of chief human resources officers at large

companies told the Gallup polling and consulting firm a few months ago
that their executive team believed remote employees might secretly
work for multiple companies.

It is probably no surprise then that 50 per cent of the HR bosses said

their business had punitive policies for workers who flouted hybrid rules
— a big jump from the 16 per cent who said this in September 2022.

I understand why executives might harbour these fears, especially if

they lack systems enabling managers to have a good idea of what staff
are doing and how well they’re doing it, no matter where they work. As
Klotz says, the worry about multiple job-jugglers probably reflects a
larger concern about how invisible remote workers spend their time.

I can also see why employees savaged by endless lay-offs such as those
in the US tech sector might find the safety of two jobs appealing, despite
the stress involved. A website called Overemployed was started by such
a person in 2021 to help other two-timers “give the man, aka Corporate
America, the middle finger for always trying to screw the little people
over”.

But I was surprised to see research published by the consultancy

McKinsey in September showing that 5 per cent of the workforce in a
typical organisation was engaged in the “growing phenomenon” of
double-dipping.

McKinsey described what it called “polyworkers” as full-time salaried

employees holding two or more jobs simultaneously, probably in secret,
and often when working remotely.

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 Even 5 per cent sounds high to me, but that is because my one job takes
up more than enough time.

Also I am not a software engineer. The only two-timing case I have

personally heard about concerned a man in that job at a small start-up
who was sacked as soon as his bosses discovered what he was doing.

He might have been inspired by Bryan Roque, another software

engineer who lost his job at Amazon early in the pandemic.

Roque then managed to acquire three jobs at IBM, Meta and Tinder, he
told the Business Insider news site recently, which put him on track to
earn more than $820,000 a year.

But the stress of long hours and keeping each employer secret from the
others took its toll, especially after Meta asked him to go into the office
for a couple of days a week.

If he couldn’t book a room to make private IBM and Tinder calls, he had
to have nerve-jangling conversations in Meta’s open plan office that
could have easily been overheard.

He ended up ditching all three jobs and taking a solitary new one, which
I find instructive.

If someone with Roque’s steely nerves could not hack this extreme form
of moonlighting, for close to $1mn, there may not be too many others
like him. And even if there are, they may not last nearly as long as a lot
of managers fear.

pilita.clark@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023. All rights reserved.

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