Remote workers doing multiple jobs in the same time frame, getting away with it, underperforming.

[flashbac]

"Remote working has made it easier than ever for staff to moonlight. But how do they cope with clashing meetings and two bosses? And can the rewards be worth the lies?"

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/16/its-the-biggest-open-secret-out-there-the-double-lives-of-white-collar-workers-with-two-jobs

Can you imagine having two computers on and being on two zoom meetings simultaneously? (Advice is to mute yourself and turn camera off.)

I think this if CF territory. I hope it doesn't become more mainstream. Remote working is a force for good. These CFs might ruin it for everyone.
And aibu to think the bullshittting aspect of this will be easier for men to get away with? Here is someone explaining how to get away with underperformance. Apparently if you keep sending your manager emails about how hard you are trying they will stay off your back:

overemployed.com/set-low-expectations-at-your-two-remote-jobs/

@Icenii

WFH can massively help women. I wouldn't be able to commute into the city daily and do my role. But WFH means I can fit both children and work in. It's a niche role with limited females anyway. I changed jobs because daily I was exposed to microagressions in the workplace having to work in close proximity to men who came into the profession from the forces. I don't get that WFH. I also have male colleagues who now also WFH and take time off for school runs etc. People are accepting of parents.

WFH not only benefits females it also benefits people with disabilities, lower socioecomic groups who can't afford commutes etc, as well as others. It opens up oppurtunity.

It also saves companies huge overheads like renting office space and larger companies like HSBC have always accepted wfh for 2-3 days a week in it’s office roles.!

I have two jobs and very occasionally the timings overlap so I have to take my full time work laptop to my part time second job, or knock off a bit early. I am honest about it and make the time up though for my main employer, my second employer is also OK with me finishing off my main job as my first couple of hours in the second job are quite quiet and I can easily multitask. I am taxed at 40% on both jobs and as I say have declared both jobs to each employer.

Years ago I worked with a guy who was doing this in the office. We were on an IT helpdesk, and he was running his own web hosting business on the side. He actually had his server plugged in under the desk. Our bosses knew- the rest of us complained regularly- but did nothing. I don’t think they wanted to shine a light on how long he’d been getting away with it.

If people are genuinely more productive at home, then I don't know why companies are not increasing objectives. If you're paid for 8 hours work a day and finish it in 6, then you should be asking for 2 hours more of work, not swanning off. And if there is no more work, then maybe the company will need less staff*

I really, really disagree with this. Why should the company always benefit from 100% of the productivity gains? Why can't the employee? Particularly since many employers are not the ones who invest in upskilling staff, often staff invest their own money & time in training.

OP Im an employment lawyer and what you're posting about not being allowed two jobs isn't actually correct. Your contract will specify if you're not allowed another job. Otherwise you can do what you like in your own time (of course not if the two overlap) with the obvious exceptions of things like working for a competing business.

Plenty of people have a desk job and then do bar work etc in the evenings.

Ahh, another opportunity for the dinosaurs to grab on to an extreme situation and claim that means WFH doesn’t work for most businesses. End result, we are all dragged back to offices to do a two hour+ commute every day and working parents (mainly women) who need the flexibility are again assigned to the bottom of the heap, lose out on promotions and remain on the wrong side of the gender pay gap.

If someone isn’t WFH efficiently, they won’t work in the office efficiently. It is a recruitment and management issue, not a WFH issue.

@cloudtree

OP Im an employment lawyer and what you're posting about not being allowed two jobs isn't actually correct. Your contract will specify if you're not allowed another job. Otherwise you can do what you like in your own time (of course not if the two overlap) with the obvious exceptions of things like working for a competing business.

Plenty of people have a desk job and then do bar work etc in the evenings.

I'm talking about doing the two simultaneously, in answer to those who say "I'm not doing anything wrong because my contract doesn't say I'm not allowed to."

OP Im an employment lawyer and what you're posting about not being allowed two jobs isn't actually correct. Your contract will specify if you're not allowed another job.

Yep. In 30 years I never had a contract that says I can’t have another job. The only clause that’s ever been was in one contract I had where if I was doing any other outside job or volunteering I had to declare and conflict of interest.

@BoredZelda

Ahh, another opportunity for the dinosaurs to grab on to an extreme situation and claim that means WFH doesn’t work for most businesses. End result, we are all dragged back to offices to do a two hour+ commute every day and working parents (mainly women) who need the flexibility are again assigned to the bottom of the heap, lose out on promotions and remain on the wrong side of the gender pay gap.

If someone isn’t WFH efficiently, they won’t work in the office efficiently. It is a recruitment and management issue, not a WFH issue.

My post was not intended to be critical of wfh, its criticism of the CFs who are taking the piss and in turn giving wfh a bad name.

And aibu to think the bullshittting aspect of this will be easier for men to get away with?

Yes. YABU to suggest that women are genetically predisposed to any kind of character trait, or to suggest that women can’t be just as good at lies and manipulation.

My post was not intended to be critical of wfh, its criticism of the CFs who are taking the piss and in turn giving wfh a bad name.

I never suggested your post was.

@BoredZelda

OP Im an employment lawyer and what you're posting about not being allowed two jobs isn't actually correct. Your contract will specify if you're not allowed another job.

Yep. In 30 years I never had a contract that says I can’t have another job. The only clause that’s ever been was in one contract I had where if I was doing any other outside job or volunteering I had to declare and conflict of interest.

Oh here we go, not this again. We are talking about workers doing time theft to do multiple jobs at the same time, in the same time frame.

"Implied terms
Every contract of employment has general ‘implied’ terms for employees and employers including:

you and your employer have a duty of trust to each other, for example, if you lied when you said you were sick to get time off work, you’ll have broken an implied contractual term of trust
you and your employer have a duty of care towards each other and other employees - for example, your employer should provide a safe working environment for you and you should use equipment safely
you have a duty to obey any ‘reasonable’ instructions given by your employer - there is no legal definition of reasonable, but it wouldn’t be reasonable to tell you to do something illegal"

A very simplified version, from Citizens Advice Bureau.

@BoredZelda

And aibu to think the bullshittting aspect of this will be easier for men to get away with?

Yes. YABU to suggest that women are genetically predisposed to any kind of character trait, or to suggest that women can’t be just as good at lies and manipulation.

No. It doesn't mean that. It means societies are more susceptible to believing lies and bullshit from men, because men's behaviour is held to a lower standard.

@BoredZelda

Ahh, another opportunity for the dinosaurs to grab on to an extreme situation and claim that means WFH doesn’t work for most businesses. End result, we are all dragged back to offices to do a two hour+ commute every day and working parents (mainly women) who need the flexibility are again assigned to the bottom of the heap, lose out on promotions and remain on the wrong side of the gender pay gap.

If someone isn’t WFH efficiently, they won’t work in the office efficiently. It is a recruitment and management issue, not a WFH issue.

I think a lot of employers don’t realise just how little people work in the office. It’s harder to track what everyone’s doing as you can just go and have a natter / go for a nap for 2 hours and pretend you were in a meeting. You can’t do that if all your meetings are Teams based. The managers who don’t realise how beneficial wfh is to their organisation probably don’t understand the technology that underpins it.

@Hiphopopotamus

If people are genuinely more productive at home, then I don't know why companies are not increasing objectives. If you're paid for 8 hours work a day and finish it in 6, then you should be asking for 2 hours more of work, not swanning off. And if there is no more work, then maybe the company will need less staff?

This attitude is so wrong. If you’re being paid to do a job and you’re doing that job well, why does it matter if you’re taking 6 hours instead of 8?

Agreed.

I pay people for the work they do, not the number of hours a week they should be sitting in a chair.

Lockdowns and WFH have been a revelation in how we see our employees and how run our business. We've ended up with an almost completely self-led working schedule - as long as people are available for calls/meetings during core hours (10-2), we let people set their own schedules and where they work, they just have to put it on the shared calendar so we know where they are. It's been a 50/50 split and a surprising number still want to be in the office at least a couple of days a week.

If someone gets all their work done between 9-2, good for them. If they want to do the core hours plus one in the morning and a couple in the evening, doing freelance work in other hours, fine. Everyone is happier and more productive, and our output is as good as ever (or better, in some cases).

We are talking about workers doing time theft to do multiple jobs at the same time, in the same time frame.

It is only time theft if your contractual obligation to your employer is hours based.

Many professional contracts are responsibility based, requiring the employee to fulfill various outputs and responsibilities, regardless of time taken. This can benefit the employer (think overworked employee struggling at 10pm to complete their contractual responsibilities). It can also benefit the employee. If their contract is not hours based, there is no theft of hours and no "piss taking". If I can do my role in half the time someone else can, good for me.

If you're paid for 8 hours work a day and finish it in 6, then you should be asking for 2 hours more of work

Why should I provide more valuable output for my employer than a slower working peer?
What if I've spent my own free time and money to up skill and thus enable myself to use additional skills, tools or software to reduce the time my work takes? I've made that investment, not my employer, so I deserve the benefit of the resulting productivity gains.

A very good point, @ozanj.

I think a lot of employers don’t realise just how little people work in the office. It’s harder to track what everyone’s doing as you can just go and have a natter / go for a nap for 2 hours and pretend you were in a meeting. You can’t do that if all your meetings are Teams based. The managers who don’t realise how beneficial wfh is to their organisation probably don’t understand the technology that underpins it.

To ensure we know what everyone's working on while we're not all in the same physical space, we now have a variety of project management tools and Slack to see exactly what everyone's up to, what they're doing, and when. So it's far easier now to know what a particular person is doing on any given day or week than it was when they were at their desk all day looking busy - it's better for them, because we're flexible with working hours so if they're efficient and get stuff done early, that's an early finish for that day. And it's better for us, because it's helped us see where workloads have become uneven, or people have HUGE amounts of extra capacity, which has lead to better distribution of work and in some cases, pairing people up to skillshare and allow them to work better together to distribute work and improve their skills.

Obviously, we checked in with people and teams before, but it was less regularly and more of an overview of a particular week or month. Now, we're seeing in realtime what everyone's up to and checking in with one another every morning on the day's plans, which means we can spot patterns and respond better.

I'm beating this drum a lot on here at the moment, it amazes me how many people can't see how good flexible working/WFH is possible with the right tools, management style, and project management and that any business who can't see the benefit of those things/tools probably isn't running efficiently in-office, either.

@Spiceup

Because when just being present in an office isn't the qualifying factor of promotions and advancement, and actually performance is then its better for women.

But in the real world that doesn't happen. It might be hiw we'd like it to be, how it should be, but it's not how things are in practice.

Meantime women (and their partners) believe they can and should be able to manage everything at home and become invisible at work.

That's why I said 'when'. And I can see it happening the more people are at home, within my industry.

That post was in reply someone replying to my longer post.

As more and more of the 'slackers' return to the office, ita going to highlight, that wfh wasn't the issue. The issue was their work ethic.

I think there’s a bigger societal problem that fed beyond the individual though. As a very general rule I don’t think homes make good workplaces, and I think it has far reaching impacts.

Emergency situation (pandemic) no problem. Long term? No.

We've had this. A member of staff's performance while WFH tanked so we called him back in to the office, gave him a performance review, set our expectations and asked him to start working from the office again. To say he was pissed off was an understatement and we were really confused.

It then came to light that he'd actually started up his own business, doing exactly the same thing, and was holding himself out as being "open" from 9am to 5.30pm every day!

This was totally against the terms of his employment contract so we were just starting to look in to disciplinary proceedings when the affect of the performance review must have taken effect and he decided to go and get another job instead! So that was a problem off of our hands at least, and saved me a huge amount of time dealing with HR!

Needless to say, I declined to provide a performance reference when his new employer contacted us. As much as I feel bad that they're inheriting a potentially bad apple, I was just pleased to get him off my hands!

It means societies are more susceptible to believing lies and bullshit from men, because men's behaviour is held to a lower standard.

Many are susceptible to believing this kind of bullshit.

But in the real world that doesn't happen. It might be hiw we'd like it to be, how it should be, but it's not how things are in practice.

I’ve been recently promoted despite having a 3 at home, 2 in the office work pattern. This was over 4 others (men) who are f/t office based. It is happening in organisations who value quality over quantity and judge based on performance not presence.

My former workplace, which was always very resistant to any kind of home working when I was last there five years ago, has undergone something of a transformation, hurried along by Covid and the necessity of suddenly arranging for an entire organisation who had never worked from before to do so.

They've now fully embraced flexible working whereby they let staff choose where they work best. That might be entirely at home, it might be entirely in the office, or it might be a hybrid of the two. I've just accepted an offer to return in an entirely home-based capacity and I would never have been able to do so had they not changed their philosophy. During my interview, they specifically talked about how they had noticed how hard people worked when they were choosing where they worked from, and my future boss admitted that when she went in to the office recently for a day she got far less work done than she would usually!

This was a very traditional company who had never allowed any kind of home working previously. If you could get your work emails from home, you were doing well! But it just shows how rapidly and how successful home working has been for some sectors. They've been able to recruit people who they never would have been able to before because the pool of talent has been so widened when you don't require people to physically attend the office every day. And it has massively benefited women. My boss is a single parent who has gained an hour and 45 minutes out of her day from no longer having to commute, which has made a massive difference to how smoothly her life and home runs. Working from home also means that we don't need childcare due to the hours we work - we can hand over DC and go straight into our office. With commuting, that would be impossible and we would have to pay for extra nursery or wraparound care.

People who take the piss take the piss anywhere. If someone is underperforming at home then there are steps to address that, just like there are steps when someone underperforms in the office. It's about management and about being able to recognise performance and output. If a manager or management team is unable to tell when people are genuinely not working, then that says a lot about the processes and how effective (or rather ineffective) management is and also about the job itself.

But of course we still look at hours worked rather than output. It’s mad, really.

I agree with this. If we could move to a system where, assuming the nature of the job allows it as many of them do, you are paid for the job rather than the hours, we might find it a lot better. Teams and individuals can work out between themselves when they need to coincide for meetings etc. Other than that, if it's all getting done on time and to the proper standard, why should it matter how long it took or when and where it was done?

@DrSbaitso

But of course we still look at hours worked rather than output. It’s mad, really.

I agree with this. If we could move to a system where, assuming the nature of the job allows it as many of them do, you are paid for the job rather than the hours, we might find it a lot better. Teams and individuals can work out between themselves when they need to coincide for meetings etc. Other than that, if it's all getting done on time and to the proper standard, why should it matter how long it took or when and where it was done?

This always sounds utopian but I used to have a job where I could work any hours if I got my work done (academic) and I had a partner who worked in another job where that was also the stipulation (software developer in a company that fancied themselves as being like Google). In both cases where it led to wasn't people working as they liked, it was people working all the time.