The Wall Street Journal recently published an article showing that some “homers”-those who eschew the office and prefer to work from home-have a secret: They have two jobs. The demands of working a full-time job from home were apparently not enough to prevent some from taking on an extra one.
Remote work allows for minimally acceptable performance and weak enforcement means
There’s no compelling evidence that remote work is as productive as office work
- Remote workers can phone (Zoom) it in
- If people with well-paid remote jobs can pull moonlighting off, why not? Why not increase income?
The day of employee loyalty is long gone
Loyalty has been waning for decades and was always elusive. Now it means you have to keep your people working for just you
- Remote work has allowed homers to moonlight
- Maybe remote work is here to stay, despite all its collateral damage
Results from a survey on Mechanical Turk
Fifty-seven percent of remote employees are only doing their primary job
- 18% report some moonlighting
- A strong percentage (13%) admits to working 10 to 20 hours for another company
- Eight percent work 20-30 hours outside their primary jobs
- Twelve percent of respondents are working 20 or more hours for a company other than their primary employers
Results:
Those who don’t work outside their primary office answered “not at all,” while those who worked 5-10 hours a week felt their performance suffered “a little” or “to some extent.”
- When double the work is taken on, the less one believes their performance is adversely affected.
- The explanation here comes from research into cognitive dissonance, which reasons the harder one works, the more they value the pursuit because they have to justify the effort.
