Nine months later, she updated me to say she was still working both jobs, had received positive performance reviews at both, and even received a performance-related raise at one of them. She asked me, “I feel like the worst thing I’m doing is taking away a job from someone else, but there’s not exactly a shortage of jobs right now.
I understand this is a likely fireable offense, but why?”
That’s an interesting question. Aside from potential conflicts of interest (which can be serious), the obvious answer is that employers tend to believe they’ve purchased their employees’ full attention during work hours. Yes, you might take a personal call or watch a video on YouTube, but the assumption historically has been that you’re not doing an entire second job for a different company during your hours for the first one. And if you are working two jobs simultaneously, even if you’re getting all your work done, are you getting it done as well as you would be if your attention weren’t divided? In a lot of jobs, even if you were doing the minimum required in each position, there would be opportunity costs: You wouldn’t have the time to step back and examine the work more strategically, spot patterns, innovate, or otherwise go above and beyond.
Partager