5 risks of overemployment that HR should be aware of

1.     Productivity and performance issues

Many people would find the workload of two full-time positions to be quite challenging. Dividing their attention across multiple employers makes it harder to respond quickly to meetings or time-sensitive requests. Employees may also have less capacity to participate in collaboration, mentoring or other activities that enhance organizational performance. 

An employee juggling two jobs is likely to experience a decline in performance, missed deadlines, limited availability, below-average collaboration and eventual burnout.

2.     Legal violations

Many organizations have established policies about outside work, with additional employment often requiring approval and employees being restricted from working for competitors. Also, these policies often forbid the misuse of company resources, such as using a company laptop to complete work for another employer.

Overemployment may violate these rules, leading to termination for the employee and potential lawsuits.

3.     Erosion of institutional trust and culture

If other employees find out that a co-worker holds two jobs, they might feel resentful because they believe they've been doing extra work to make up for that person. This discovery can also erode trust between employees and management, as employees might wonder why a manager didn't notice the overemployment sooner.

Meanwhile, increased employee surveillance to detect overemployment could even further fuel employee resentment.

4.     Confidentiality violations

The most egregious scenario is if an employee is secretly working for a competing organization. Confidential and proprietary information, such as strategic plans, intellectual property and customer data, could all be at risk if the worker's dual employment continues.

An employee working for two organizations may not intend to share information across company lines, yet they could unintentionally transfer knowledge.

5.     Conflicts of interest

Working for a competitor is not the only scenario in which a conflict of interest might occur. Overemployment could also raise ethical concerns if an employee is in a position to influence vendor decisions or contracts, or if they are part of strategic decisions that affect either company.

An ethical issue could also arise if an overemployed worker prioritizes the work of a higher-paying company over that of a lower-paying one.

4 signs an employee may be overemployed

CHROs should train managers to recognize the potential signs that an employee could be holding an undisclosed second job, including the following:

• Limited availability. The employee may have frequent meeting conflicts or consistently decline meetings at certain times.
• Minimum visibility. The employee may stay off camera in remote meetings, seldom speak up and avoid presentations.
• Slow responses to team members. The employee may be unavailable for lengthy periods during the workday.
• Lack of engagement. The employee might avoid volunteering for extra responsibility, and they may fail to contribute new ideas.

Strategies for identifying overemployment

CHROs and other HR leaders who are keeping an eye out for overemployment in their workforces must do so without violating employee privacy.

This can be accomplished in several ways. CHROs can instruct their managers to evaluate employee performance as normal, including tracking missed deadlines and how often workers collaborate with others. Employees' absences, meeting participation and general availability should also be tracked. HR staff should also monitor off-hours network usage logs, as an employee frequently logging on after business hours could indicate that the worker is catching up on missed work. However, it is important that managers avoid making unfair assumptions and instead evaluate patterns over time and address concerns through established HR processes.    

Overemployment can put companies at risk in various ways. CHROs must ensure their companies have put overemployment policies in writing and that their HR staff and managers are aware of the potential signs of an employee working two jobs. However, this data gathering must be carried out in a way that respects employee privacy and complies with applicable laws and organizational policies.

Scott Robinson is an enterprise data architect at New Era Technology, a global digital transformation firm. He is an IT veteran with more than 25 years of experience, a social scientist and the author of Modern Data-Centric Architecture.