Moonlighting

When I first read this headline last week I was convinced it was The Onion.  I clicked on it fully expecting a joke about how work-life balance was being replaced by work-work balance. 

Nope.  Dead serious. 

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We’ve all heard stories like it-- never quite at this scale-- and it always makes us smirk a little self-righteously-- a misdemeanor-level tsk-tsk-- aimed at some poor sap who was clearly too clever for their own good.

But maybe– just maybe– we’re indicting the wrong class of workers; blaming the powerless for the shortcomings of the more powerful. 

Employees— especially younger and underpaid ones— who are clever enough to moonlight (and meet expectations at both jobs) are demonstrating that the management classes in the corporate world don’t yet have a good framework for assessing employee capacity.  At least nothing that can’t be gamed with a $29 mouse-mover device. 

So it’s actually the expectations and practices of the management classes that need to be prosecuted and tsk-tsked.  It’s performance- and compensation-models that need a fundamental rethink.  It’s how we all define the value and impact of employee- and team-contributions that need to be recast.

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This is at the heart of why the senior management classes are so weirdly committed to bringing people back into the office post-pandemic.  Yes, there are more opportunities for serendipitous hallway encounters on your way to the bathroom.  And yes, there’s better collaboration when you’re all locked in the same conference room. 

But at its root, forcing people back into the office– even in short, quarterly bursts– is just reinforcing an old and ineffective management habit… because being seen in the office remains old-school management’s sorry proxy for productivity.

So the path to a more flexible tomorrow— one with better, more sustainable business outcomes and happier, healthier employees— has to start with effective productivity metrics… serving as *the* foundational component of a more thoughtful approach to hybrid work.

Because if we solve for that, management shouldn’t care how often you use the bathroom (you know… socially) or if you have a second job that uses the rest of your brain and time.

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Fun postscript.  Here’s my 2-word Lex-Luthor-level advice for the more clever among us: understand technicalities. No one is ever fired for being productive outside work. They’re fired for not registering that activity with the bureaucracies involved.  

Hint: there are HR forms for outside engagements and the less clever among us use them regularly.  They might backfire if your manager is actually awake (highly unlikely).  But then at least you’re having the right conversation with them.

Two more words of advice: consider consulting.

I hear Wipro’s hiring.