Employers Are Confused About Which Employees To Be Mad At Now

If you follow the bouncing ball of workplace narratives since COVID, we’ve had quite a few, and many of them end up somewhat contradictory. The basic recap is:

• Now everyone is remote (gasp)
• The Great Resignation
• Quiet Quitting
• Quiet Hiring
• Quit-Toking
• Act Your Wage
• Nobody wants to work anymore (Biden free money)

These happened at different times, and all of them still exist somewhat, at least in the sense that people write about them and discuss them on cable news and whatnot. In fact, a woman I do some work with commented on it this morning on CNN:

So now there’s a concern that some employees are holding 2–3 jobs, often 2–3 “full-time” jobs, and collecting pay from each. Personally I think no one should give a shit about this. Companies have been fleecing workers and stagnating wages, even in white-collar jobs, for 30 years now. If an employee wants to exploit the biggest weakness of companies, let them.

What’s this “biggest weakness of companies,” you ask? Well, oftentimes inside companies, no one knows who is doing what or how long anything takes. The executives are mostly concerned about money and growth. They don’t worry about workflows. They spend their weeks in meetings and on planes and discussing money and financial acronyms. Middle managers should worry about workflows, and often they worry about them in the sense of micromanagement, but in reality they think the grass is greener on the “deals and planes and financial acronyms” side, so they try to position themselves closer to that.

Most people I’ve ever talked to about work have had one job, possibly 3–4 jobs, where they come in to an office and sit there all day doing essentially nothing. Once in a while, they get an assignment, and it takes two hours. I was in Fredericksburg, TX with some neighbors this weekend, and one of my neighbors once had an executive-level logistics job, and he said he just sat there all day wondering what to do.

Companies are clueless about that. I worked for TCU last summer and had absolutely nothing to do for most of my time there.

In reality, companies just want tasks done, and I don’t think they really care who or what is doing the tasks, so long as the tasks are checked off. That’s part of what makes the coming wave of automation so scary for the employee level. Companies have long been pretty bad at defining job role.

So, if you can exploit a company’s blind spot and take salaried or hourly money off 2–3 companies simultaneously, I say more power to you.

Of course, the pro-company, pro-capitalist narrative on all this is “If you sign with one company, you have a responsibility to that company,” and that’s the narrative that legally will win out. Most employers would fire you if they thought you were double-dipping, but in reality you’re likely at-will anyway, and they could have fired you for wearing a Radiohead shirt on a Zoom call. The hiring/firing dance is all very tedious too.

It’s funny how we went from “nobody wants to work anymore!” — the lamest of the Fox News crowd dog whistles — to “People are working too many jobs and I feel wronged!”

If you want to stop people from working for other people, it’s pretty easy:

• Understand what needs to be done within your company.
• Understand the difference between real work and busy work.
• Talk to people about where the gaps are.
• Hire for the roles you need.
• Promote and advance responsibilities as warranted.
• Don’t hire just to show growth or because one manager barked loudly about his/her needs.
• Don’t hire at a level where you need to consistently do boom and bust layoffs.
• Then you will end up with people who have 30–45 hours of work to do for you, and they won’t need to double-dip with others.

It’s not complicated, but personalities and politics and the need for relevance get in the way.