Episode 117: My employee is moonlighting two jobs?!

Voice Over: You’re about to listen to another episode of What The Hell Just Happened?! Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss and sometimes even solve some interesting HR problems.

Paul: And… I’m gonna go off the rails sometimes and talk about whatever I want.

Grace: Hi Paul.

Paul: Hey Grace.

Grace: So, the internet knows us really really well.

Paul: Us? You mean CEDR or just people in general?

Grace: Just people.

Paul: Oh my gosh. It does.

Grace: I don’t know what your targeted ads and like your social media feeds look like.

Paul: Mostly pasta makers and grills.

[Paul laughs]

[Grace laughs]

Grace: I was really hoping if you’re going to share that it was HR appropriate and it was.

Paul: It was.

Grace: Yeah, pasta makers, and grills. That’s really good. Mine’s a lot of mommy content but they also, the internet, the algorithms, they know that I’m into HR and employment law.

Paul: Oh yeah.

[Grace laughs]

Grace: And I get all these HR videos.

Paul: Oh no kidding?!

Grace: So, they know I’m a nerd. I even wore my glasses today…

Paul: Sweet!

Grace: …for this podcast just so we could talk about nerdy things. But I’ve seen a couple that I thought would be fun to talk about. There was one, and actually this wasn’t even an HR blog but they got me with their targeted video, and it was a financial planning site, but they were celebrating people who had two remote jobs at the same time secretly. And the point of the video but I was kind of watching it from a different angle was “look at how great this is!” They’re paying off their mortgage, they’re out of debt, they paid down their credit, whatever it was. They paid on their credit card. Good for them. And I was thinking all about the employer’s perspective.

Paul: Our remote employees? Now, I’m wondering what they’re doing!

[Grace laughs]

Grace: And then the kind of the next thought was, well, our handbook covers that and how do we protect our employers from this happening to them and how often is this happening. I wanted to talk about that phenomenon a little bit.

Paul: Okay. So let the immediate observation. It is, okay so one of the things that we do when we work with our members and one of the things our members want to do. So, this is what we want from them and this is what they want from us is they want to be in integrity. They want to follow the laws. I can tell you it’s very rare. It has happened on occasion and we have had to let a member or two go over this… Whereby when we’re working through the issues in their office or we’re maybe just getting exposed to them and we discover that they’re doing something that’s not exactly copacetic. Maybe they’re not computing overtime quite correctly or they’re not paying bonuses properly or any myriad of things. I mean, it’s astounding how many of them are like “oh my gosh I didn’t know I need to fix this.” So, they really want to be in integrity.

Grace: Yeah.

Paul: And doing the right thing and following the laws and they’re really not trying to break any rules. So, with that in mind knowing that I’m an advocate for employers. I’m a small employer myself. I think that I’m just going to say this, maybe we have to cut it out later…

[Grace laughs]

Paul: I think that if your financial advisors are celebrating what is in effect wage theft, it calls into question that company in and of itself.

Grace: Yeah.

Paul: It’s not honest.

Grace: Yeah, the secrecy part of it, in my brain immediately went to our moonlighting policy. If you have a CEDR handbook, everybody is required to disclose if they have another job.

Paul: Yup.

Grace: And then, on the one side, I’m with you like we’re employer advocates at CEDR and you want to go, “wait a minute, no!” And then, the other side is I think about well for years I’ve been taking calls in the Solution Center where people, you know, they waitress after work or they bartend after work and “hey, is that a problem and am I allowed to approve that?” But now it’s like these things are happening at the same time and if they’re not disclosed that’s really the problem.

Paul: It really is the problem because you don’t have a say in it.

Grace: Yeah.

Paul: If I gave you a say in it, Grace, if you were the employer, would you say “yeah, it’s okay for in one 5 minutes you work for me and in the next 5 minutes you work for someone else and then you come back in the next 5 minutes?”

Grace: Two different jobs, yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Grace: It just seems impossible that you would be able to perform at the level you need to perform at for both.

Paul: Oh, let me tell you how it is possible…

Grace: Yeah.

Paul: So, in other words, they are not expanding your capabilities and I think that’s what we expect from people and people expect from us.

Grace: Right.

Paul: Okay. We expect from people, employers, managers, owners, expect from the folks that we’re working, that are working with us and for us. We expect them to get more efficient, to make us better, to improve us, to improve our relationship to our customers, to our patients.

Grace: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s an interesting trend to watch and something I think will bubble up at a lot of our offices and worth spending a few minutes thinking about.

Paul: Crazy things.

Grace: Crazy.

Paul: That is a good what the hell just happened in HR. Yeah. That’s a good one. Thanks, Grace.

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