I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs. Presumably you don't limit births either and being a parent is effectively taking on another job. If the work output is acceptible or not is what should matter alone to you as a manager. Not how exactly the sausage is getting made.
For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.
If I’m paying you $200k to be a full time employee, I have an expectation that you’re proactive and working. Likewise, if you’re a contractor getting paid for hours, those hours are contractually exclusive to me - don’t accept the contract if you want to double dip. With a deliverable based contract, I don’t give a shit how many jobs you work, so long as you deliver. Respect is a two way street.
When you have your wife sending proof of life texts and posing as you, pretending to have technical difficulties in meetings, not only are you not doing anything, you’re like a disease that saps the productivity of your colleagues.
With respect to kids and other “life”, we set clear expectations - you’re not paid to babysit. Personally, my expectation is that our folks are professionals and we all deal with incidental things. I was stuck waiting for a gas meter change all afternoon last week. My admin’s son had a snow day. But if your car breaks down every Friday, or your 6th grandmother has passed, that’s a problem.
Well, if they are affecting your teams performance then deal with it. If they don’t cause ripples then whatever. People were slacking off at work long before zoom was invented. Ever see Office Space?
People stacking jobs have next to no interest in anything about the jobs except getting paid, and are really easy to spot in high performance environments because they tend to make a lot of excuses and miss a lot of deadlines.
What you are saying is this: how an employee spends their time is 100% the responsibility of their manager. That's extremely infantilizing - strong teams I have worked on expect employees to self-manage their time productively and deliver about "full time" bandwidth (minus time off, maintenance work, etc) on a consistent basis so we can effectively plan and execute.
I'm speaking from experience: I had to deal with a new hire whom I was assigned to mentor who tried to juggle just one other job and it was super obvious they weren't working when they said they were. It took a long time to work through the PIP process, and effectively that person stole not only the company's time and money, but wasted a good deal my own time and patience. Fuck them and their entitled mentality. If they had gotten their shit done on time and without sketchy meeting aversion, they might have continued enjoying the second paycheck. Frankly if they had done good work and in a timely fashion it might not have mattered if they had another job - but if you're employed (not contracted) ethically speaking that employer and those coworkers are correct to expect that job to be your first priority during the work week.
Sounds like the system works fine. You cull low performers and don’t notice those who might be doing this and delivering on acceptible timelines for you. You’d have the same issues with any distraction really, job, wife, hobby, drugs, whatever it may be. All you have to really look at are the outputs no matter what you do. Alcoholics were drinking at work and slacking off when it was in person too after all. People would even simply stare at the cubical wall for a day to spite the boss.
> I don't understand how it is a problem if an employee takes on multiple jobs.
Because that's the execs' privilege. Just like how the old feudal aristocracy was free to engage in as many economic activities as they wanted for self gain but the feudal serfs were supposed to tend to their lords' fields all the time and be loyal and honest and not steal from their lords.
Who are you, the lowly pleb, to think that you can have the same privilege with your modern technolords... Know your place.
For example, this employee who is supposedly spending 1/6th of their time on your job. If you say tried to capitalize their time such that you now have 6/6ths on your tasks, would the employee even accept this arragement themselves? You are effectively giving them 1/6th the pay for the same full time day of work they do anyhow. Squeezing this employee is not going to see you get more work out of them. It is going to see them leave your company and replace that job with another, leaving you shortstaffed and having to invest in vetting candidates and onboarding. Now you ask how much you get out of an employee you put the squeeze on given that this will lead to turnover and an overall loss of that full time work being done as you suffer through a period of short staffing.