A company decides to test a four-day work week and ends up firing an employee for having two jobs
The employee, who had already had several meetings for poor performance, was performing tasks with applications that did not correspond to him, according to the monitoring of his computer.
The co-founder and chief commercial officer of a remote recruiting company fired an employee after software installed on his computer revealed that he had been working two jobs at the same time. Patrick Synge, chief commercial officer of Metrickal, a Barcelona-based company, said that one of his employees, hired in 2022, began missing deadlines, and the company started receiving complaints from dissatisfied clients.
“I had a feeling that he was doing something on the side, but because there was no proof, I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Synge told Business Insider. He also described meeting with the employee several times to address his poor performance. “Although there were some signs of improvement, his overall performance did not change much. This placed a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to cover his workload and deal with missed deadlines,” he added.
In December 2023, the company’s co-founder decided to test a four-day workweek and asked the team to install DeskTime and track data on employees’ computers to better understand how they were spending their time and how productivity could be improved.
Other tasks during the workday
That is when the surprise emerged. After reviewing the data, Synge realized that the employee had been performing tasks during working hours that were unrelated to his position at Metrickal. In addition, the employee was spending nearly half of his work time doing tasks for a second company.
The decision to terminate his employment followed soon after. Synge said it was unfair to the rest of the team to have to compensate for someone else’s poor performance, which is why he chose to let the employee go. “I don’t think it’s fair to the rest of the team who have to cover up for someone else’s low performance… his actions were just selfish,” he said.
“As an entrepreneur, I have to think about my business and clients first. I can’t afford to lose clients because someone wants to make extra money,” Synge added.
The executive clarified that he has no issue with people having side jobs and even supports them as a way to earn additional income. However, he stressed that such work should be done on personal time and should not affect the quality of an employee’s primary job.
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