- Patrick Singh fired one of his employees who was secretly working remotely on the side.
- He told how he caught the employee and why he decided to fire him.
- He said overemployment was “unethical” and hurt worker productivity.
This essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Singh, co-founder and CEO of a business process outsourcing and remote recruitment company. Metrical, headquartered in Barcelona. There are 10 full time, In addition to our fully remote employees, we have more than 200 contract workers across the world. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m the CEO of a company where all employees work fully remotely, and in January I discovered that one of my employees was secretly working a second full-time remote job.
Here’s how it all played out and why I decided to fire them.
My company is headquartered in Barcelona. However, one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022 and was doing a very good job initially. But then we started getting complaints from clients about assignments and missed deadlines. He was also becoming quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started becoming somewhat regular.
I became suspicious when this employee started refusing to work certain shifts that he normally works. I had a feeling he was doing something on the side, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions because I had no proof.
So I met with him one-on-one instead to discuss his performance and told him that the same issues continued and that I would have no choice but to terminate him if the situation did not change.
Although he showed signs of improvement, his overall performance did not change much, which put a lot of strain on the rest of the team who had to cover his shifts and deal with missed deadlines.
How I finally caught him
In December, unrelated to this employee, At my company, we implemented time tracking software called DeskTime.
My long-term goal is to implement a 4-day workweek at my company, and I decided that the first step in this process was to understand how my employees spend their time and what I could optimize to be more productive.
So the whole team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime, and everyone was well aware that this rollout was happening, as they all had to install the app on their own computers.
A few weeks later, I looked at the tracking data for this particular employee and noticed that the name of another company (a US company) was appearing regularly in the data, making it clear that this employee was working for another company.
I fired them the next day.
DeskTime data showed the employee was using software unrelated to his job during work hours, and also included a screenshot feature that captured the employee’s computer screen, showing him working on a platform that had the name of another company on it.
Based on DeskTime data, we can estimate that he spent roughly half his time working for this other company, and he likely forgot about the tracking software, since once downloaded, it doesn’t have to be manually turned on and off.
To be honest, other indicators like missing deadlines, inflexibility, and lack of response at certain times already convinced me that he was doing something else during work hours. I would have fired him anyway, but the tracking data was the hard evidence I was missing.
Shortly after I fired him, he updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect that he was working full time for another company, which leads me to believe he was working full time for another company.
Why I think overemployment is unethical
Some may criticize me, but I do not support the trend of overemployment at all. I think it is unethical and wrong.
First of all, I don’t think it’s fair to the rest of the team to have to cover for someone’s poor performance. This is why keeping this employee with the company was not an option. He was neither fair nor respectful towards the team, which I cannot tolerate. His behavior was simply selfish.
Secondly, even with AI and other tools, I don’t believe a person can be productive doing two tasks at the same time. It will distract them and the quality of their work will suffer. As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and my customers first. I can’t lose a customer just because someone wants to make an extra buck.
I have nothing against people taking on a side hustle to make extra income, but this should be something you do on your own time and shouldn’t affect the quality of your day job.
Do you have multiple remote jobs at the same time and can you provide details on your pay and work schedule? Do any of your colleagues or employees do so? If so, please contact this reporter. jzinkula@businessinsider.com.
