In Barcelona, Metrickal, a company specialising in remote recruitment, wanted to experiment with a four-day week. In their quest for efficiency, they discovered that one of their employees also worked for another company.
An ambitious experiment
Patrick Synge, co-founder and sales director of Metrickal, embarked on an innovative project: adapting working patterns to enable his teams to work only four days a week, without losing productivity. To achieve this, he asked his employees to install DeskTime software, a digital activity monitoring tool that identifies how each person uses their time at their workstation. But the tool, which was supposed to help optimise tasks, revealed a completely different reality.
An employee… doing double duty
Analysis of the DeskTime data revealed that a fully telecommuting employee, already under surveillance for reduced performance, was spending more than half his day on activities unrelated to Metrickal. The company he appeared to be working for? An American company, identified in the automatically generated reports.
“‘He probably forgot that the software was running in the background'”‘”, Patrick Synge told Business Insider. “I suspected something, but without proof, I didn’t want to act lightly.” This time, the evidence was irrefutable.
The last straw
In addition to the discovery of undeclared multiple employment, it was the workload passed on to colleagues that exasperated management. “His lateness weighed on the rest of the team. It wasn’t fair or respectful”, laments the manager. For him, loyalty to the company and his colleagues takes precedence over any other consideration.
Ironically, Patrick Synge regularly posts on the internet as an advocate of “side hustle”, those secondary jobs that allow him to supplement his income. He has even used it as a means of external recruitment for his own products. Except that in this case, he implicitly considered Metrickal to be the main job… without imagining that it could only be the second.
While the situation of the Barcelona employee may seem marginal, it illustrates a growing trend: in Spain, according to a study by Infojobs, 15% of workers have at least two jobs, sometimes simultaneously. For 40% of them, the aim is to make up for insufficient income, while 32% are looking for a financial supplement.
