Boss reveals why he fired employee after catching them secretly working a second remote job

Gone are the days where your boss needs to see you to know you’ve clocked in for your shift.

Unless you’re in the hospitality industry, odds are you’ve worked from home – something that has become increasingly more common since the Covid-19 pandemic.

So, of course, there will be opportunists out there making the most of this and taking on a second job.

Well, that’s exactly what happened at remote recruitment company Metrickal, and it was co-founder and chief commercial officer (CCO) Patrick Synge who’d cottoned on to it.

Synge revealed all to the Business Insider.

The business is based in Barcelona, Spain, but all of his 10 employees work remotely and don’t have to come into the office.

Well, in January, he says he caught one member of staff working a second full-time job, and so decided to fire them on the spot.

The employee in question is from Peru, and lives there too.

Synge told the outlet: “He was hired in 2022, and in the beginning, he did his job very well. But then, I started to receive complaints from clients about missed assignments and deadlines.

“He had also become quite unresponsive. These complaints from clients started to become somewhat regular.”

But it was when he started refusing shifts that he would usually work that arose suspicion from the higher-ups.

The employee’s work quality began to suffer (Getty Stock Image)

Synge added: “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.”

He then held a one-on-one meeting with him to discuss his job performance and told him he would be let go if he didn’t improve.

After that he improved slightly – but not much.

In December, Metrickal rolled out a time-tracking software called DeskTime.

Synge explained the decision to do so was unrelated to the employee, but instead would be used to understand how his staff were using their time as he wanted to introduce a four-day working week.

He said: “So our entire team of full-time employees and freelance contractors started using DeskTime. They each had to install the app on their computers, so everyone was well aware that this was being implemented.

The employee’s software data showed that he’d been working for another company while on shift (Getty Stock Image)

“After a few weeks, I looked through the tracking data of the struggling employee and noticed there was another company’s name — a US business — that regularly appeared in the data.

“It became clear to me that this employee had worked on some other company’s tasks.

“I fired them the next day.”

Synge says that the data showed the employee was using software during the workday that was ‘unrelated to his job tasks’.

He added: “It also included a screenshot feature that captured his computer screen — and showed him working on a platform where the other company’s name was visible.”

He said that based on the data, he estimated that his employee spent close to half of his working hours working for the other company.

Synge added that ‘all the other signs’, like the missed deadlines, lack of response and flexibility, had previously tipped him off, adding: “I would have probably fired him anyway.”