Modern work has been completely reshaped with the increasing adoption of remote work models by organizations across industries to a global extent. What was once perceived as unimaginable, work dynamics reached a new level of flexibility. Despite this freedom at work, one pressing challenge is overemployment, referring to individuals who discreetly maintain more than one full-time job at a time.
Overemployment is gaining traction, especially in tech and information industries, where remote workers exploit the absence of in-person supervision to hold onto multiple paychecks. This scenario brought up a question for employers: How to detect overemployment without sacrificing employee morale or trust?
To tackle this challenge, employers are turning to remote employee monitoring solutions. But can these remote tools resolve the issue effectively? This is what this article shall delve into by exploring the momentum of dual employment in remote work systems, how monitoring solutions like Prodoscore and Insightful.io detect overlapping work obligations, and whether active detection strategies can outrun employee deception.
The rise of overemployment in a remote landscape
Individuals juggling multiple jobs at once is nothing new; freelancers, side hustlers, and gig workers have been going at it for years now. It is the COVID-19 pandemic that accelerated the full-time overemployment with the remote work revolution, making it hard to detect, yet logistically feasible.
Most remote jobs do not have any fixed schedules, and work productivity is measured by outcomes rather than time spent. Employees leverage this freedom by working double shifts, scheduling back-to-back meetings from multiple jobs, or alternating priority focus throughout the day.
A survey by ResumeBuilder in 2022 revealed that 69% of remote employees agreed to working a second job during their primary work hours, and 37% professed to holding two full-time positions simultaneously. For many, the cause for this action is inadequate compensation, inflation, or economic uncertainty. For the rest, it is just about earning more income, or a challenge to the idea of single-employer loyalty.
Nonetheless, this phenomenon is concerning for employers, surrounding potential breaches of contract, intellectual property risks, divided attention, and productivity decline.
How dual employment manifests and why it is hard to detect
Workers who work and juggle between two or more jobs often resort to some clever tactics, like:
- Calendar control: Strategically scheduling meetings to prevent timing overlaps, or muting and attending multiple meetings simultaneously.
- Multiple devices: Using VPNs, separate devices, or even virtual machines to remain active on multiple systems concurrently.
- Geo-masking and IP spoofing: Using proxies or VPNs to show themselves geographically consistent, even when switching roles.
- Silent workload management: Attending to urgent tasks based on deadlines and attentiveness of supervisors, or sometimes, forsaking one job for another.
Since remote work lacks in-person oversight, even small companies often struggle to recognize overemployed employees, until it starts having an impact on outcomes or team uniformity.
Can remote employee monitoring tools detect overemployment?
To overcome the issue of overemployment, organizations are increasingly resorting to remote employee monitoring technologies. These tools help monitor employees’ work patterns, evaluate productivity, and can even detect unusual signs that imply a worker is working multiple jobs.
Common detection signs can be:
- Activity anomalies: Prolonged idle periods during work hours, stressed by brief bursts of abnormally high activity.
- Concurrent logins: If a worker is logging into multiple systems simultaneously from different devices or IPs.
- Inconsistent usage patterns: Inconsistent utilization of key productivity tools or diverting attention between unrelated work applications.
- Meeting conflicts: Unexplained absences from essential conferences or frequently overlapping meetings.
Prodoscore: A smart way to monitor user behavior
Most monitoring tools primarily emphasize tracking time spent by employees, but Prodoscore takes a more performance-driven approach. As an AI-powered platform, it assigns employees a role-based activity score to analyze the alignment of their work with the expected job function.
Prodoscore measures the following key metrics:
- App usage: The frequency and consistency of employees engaging with vital software like email platforms, project management tools, CRMs, or document editors.
- Task and meeting engagement: Time spent by employees in calendar interactions, follow-ups, and meetings.
- Communication trends: The frequency and volume of messages sent via Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other collaboration apps.
By setting a threshold for each job role, Prodoscore effectively flags deviations that might point to possible dual employment. For example, a marketer heavily engaging in accounting platforms or a support agent being consistently active in developer tools could likely be warning signs.
Furthermore, it leverages trend tracking to detect anomalies. If an employee’s score suddenly spikes or drops without any visible/clear explanation, it may demand a clarification of the event, not necessarily to reprimand.
Based on company data, continuous drops in productivity scores usually start 6 to 9 weeks before reaching a breaking point, or in some cases, prior to the discovery of dual employment. This approach, however, provides employers with an opportunity to interfere early, confirm suspicions, or oversee the root causes.
Can monitoring tools end overemployment?
So, do you think remote employee monitoring can truly prevent and overcome the overemployment epidemic?
In many cases, yes. Tools like Insightful.io and Prodoscore can detect sufficient data to get a deeper insight, especially when human judgment meets with role-based expectations. For instance, if a developer’s activity score depicts a sharp decline yet has erratic availability and conflicting meetings in their work schedules, it does raise a red flag.
But these tools must not be considered as an elixir. Overdependence on monitoring tools can instead create a hostile culture. Employees may feel spied upon, and top-performing workers could be demotivated by over-surveillance. Ultimately, technology solutions should be used as a support tool to establish a healthy work culture of fair compensation and strong management practices.
Closure
The overemployment epidemic is a growing challenge, especially in remote work industries. While remote monitoring solutions like Insightful.io are effective in detecting dual employment via various metrics, these platforms work best when implemented with ethics, transparency, and leadership. Companies should adopt this approach to verify events, and also to understand employee work behaviours, determine disengagement early on, and support productivity as deemed fit, while also altering practices.
For more information on ethical monitoring strategies, visit Insightful.io.
