Episode 143: The Ethical Conundrum of the Over-Employment Trend

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show with your hosts, Josh Turley, Mark Canton.

Hey, how you doing?

Good to be back again.

Hey, man.

So I was reading a fun article this morning. Okay. My wife sent it over to me, and I had been hearing about this, but like this article just ticked me off, put me into another level.

Okay.

And it's this concept which, you know, we don't really experience a lot of this in fleet.

Right.

Mostly because we don't have a lot of remote work opportunity in fleet.

Okay.

But I'm seeing more and more there are, you know, we've got remote employees and things like that in fleet. So I felt like this was relevant.

Okay.

And there's some takeaways that I got after I read the article that was like, oh, this is definitely, definitely relevant.

Okay.

So this article talked about this woman from Wisconsin who's basically this trend called overemployment.

Okay.

Where you go out and you don't just get one job, you go out and you get 2 jobs, right?

Okay.

2 for the price of 1, essentially, right? Uh, some people choose to— if I get 2 jobs, I'm going to put a full 40 hours in at both places, right?

That's what I would assume if we're talking about 2 jobs. Yeah, well, maybe one is part-time or something like that.

That's not— that's not what's happening, right? They're working 2 jobs in the same 9-to-5 span, right? Oh, now maybe there might be a little bit of push and pull here and there, but for the most part And that was what really got me going on this article was this woman was working about 40 to 50 hours a week for both companies total.

Wow. And being paid for 40 hours.

Being paid for 40 hours right now. It's a salaried position.

Okay. Okay.

Right. And any time we have salaried positions, you pay best in, you pay based on output, right? You don't pay based on hours in a seat or anything like that or activity, which is something I'm a huge proponent of, right? You pay for the output. You don't pay for, you know, their butt in a seat.

Sure.

We've had issues with that in the past, like, you know, managers watching cameras and like, oh, this person was only here for 5 hours today, right? I don't care. Right. Did you hit the numbers? Then do whatever you want.

Right.

And that's, that's actually what really got me mad about this article. So let me, let me keep going with this.

All right.

So she basically, she's got these two jobs and she's been working and she did this for about 18 months.

Okay.

Right.

All right.

So it went on for quite some time. And the piece about it that really, you know, it's irksome, right? But is this mentality of, well, they can lay me off or they can fire me at will, so why can't I stick it to them a little bit, right? And anytime she did it, she was like, well, all these greedy corporations, all they care about is profits before people anyway. So she effectively was saying like, this was my way to stick it to the man.

Sounds like mental gymnastics.

What I— and what I read was, no, that doesn't sound like sticking to the man. That just sounds like thievery. Yeah, right. Like, you're just stealing right now, right?

Yeah, that sounds right.

The worst part about this was it's not even her fault, you know. It's the system. It's the fact that— and this is the takeaway I got, okay— was as a manager, these managers let it happen, right? They didn't— either they didn't raise the bar high enough or they didn't inspect the output You know, but you have an employee that basically is only giving you 20 to 30 hours a week, and yet you're paying them like a 40-hour employee.

Right.

And I just think of the wasted potential of, you know, if this woman had applied just that extra 10 hours, or, you know, in this case she was given about 25 hours to each office. So she had given another 15 hours to this location, you know, her first employer, how much more productive she could have been and how much more of a difference she could have made.

Sure.

In the mission. Right, right. We talk about culture a lot as a company, and I think this is one of the things that happens when you have employees and a culture that are misaligned, right? Because they don't have the passion behind the mission. They don't care about what they're working on. It really is just to make some white rich dude even whiter and richer, right? If that's a thing. And this whole premise of, you know, they don't really care because you don't really care. Right. So that, you know, that was one of my first takeaways was like, oh, I'm sticking it to the man. I'm like, no, you're not. You're just stealing. Yeah, that's just another form of thievery. That's— you're, you're charging for 40 and only working 25.

Right. Right.

On the flip side, I'm— I go back to my, my whole philosophy, which is you manage by the outputs. You don't manage by the inputs. You don't manage by, you know, how much time they're actually there. You measure what actually gets output. Right, right. It's a shame on these managers.

Yeah. You know, so reconcile this for us because like you just said at the beginning, right?

Yeah.

Like you only care about the output and you gave that example of the person who maybe only put in the 5 hours that day. Now, to give context, there's a trust aspect there that they're getting the hours in somewhere where they need to get the work done. Right, right. So go ahead. How are we reconciling that?

So what I do in that case, right, when I have an employee who's just crushing it at work and, you know, like, hey, you're coming in and this is what I needed from this position. Let's say, let's say it's like an SDR role or whatever. Okay. Or it's an engineer. Who knows? This is what I need out of this position, right? If you come in and you do that in half the time, well, then I need to— one, I need to give you a raise because you're clearly way more productive than I thought you were.

Right.

And then B, I need to raise the bar on you.

Right.

I need to push you to be better. Right. You don't hire a star quarterback and then find out like, man, they're throwing, you know, record-breaking years for touchdowns. And you know, you gotta reward the, you know, the behavior you want to keep.

Sure.

But then at the same time, you can't expect like, oh, well now they're only doing 50 touchdowns a year because, well, they got a second job throwing the football on Sundays for somebody else. Right?

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I'm gonna play the first half for you and—

Yeah, it doesn't happen.

Right.

So you gotta reward 'em and keep that type of talent, but then you gotta raise the bar on 'em too and say, well, hey, you know, Tom, you're doing a great job throwing 75 touchdowns a year.

Right.

We're going to set your compensation around this to now focus on like 80 touchdowns or 90 touchdowns, right? Sure. Because you have greatness in you and you really want to win. Well, this is how we're going to win, you know?

Right.

And so you do— you have to raise the bar, you know, and obviously you need to raise comp with that. But if you're capable of more, then we both need to push ourselves, right? I need to push myself harder to pay you more and I need to push you harder to earn more. Right?

Right.

So that's— that's one piece, right, is I got to reset expectations. But in order to do that, I have to measure what those expectations were for the, for the first part of this. Right. So for this lady to come in and be able to work two 25-hour jobs, the managers clearly didn't know how long the job took. Right. Right. And this goes— this is a principle that I followed going back to Grandpa. Right. He'd walk around and they find like data entry clerks back then. This is the '80s and '90s, right? So just bear with us.

Right.

But they would be playing solitaire on the computer. Right, right. That's totally an old people thing. Windows 95 came out and everybody was like, "Oh, Solitaire, this is fantastic." I must be old because I'm guilty of playing Solitaire on a computer. A little bit of Minesweeper there, Mark.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Right, nowadays the kids would be on Facebook, TikToks, doom scrolling, whatever.

Right.

But that was his thing is he'd walk around and people just assumed this lady was always busy.

Right.

And she was the data entry clerk. And she had a stack of papers this tall, right? Well, guess what? That stack of papers never went down, never went up, because she was incentivized. She was paid by the hour. It didn't really matter what the work output was, right? So his, his opinion was always, you have to know how long the job, you know, what the job is and how long the job should take so you can pay appropriately for that, right? And in this case, clearly, for this lady who was doing two 25-hour jobs, they didn't know how long the job should take. And they weren't measuring necessarily her output or pushing her to do better. She even went on to say that in her reviews— this is when I kicked myself in the shins— she said in the reviews she was doing amazing, right? Managers were giving her great feedback and telling her she was awesome. Oh, man. So something's wrong. Something's totally wrong with the picture. So when I think about this for fleet, right, and I go back to that example from Grandpa, we don't really have a lot of these remote positions in fleet, right? If you go out to the shop floor, you can definitely see who's working and who's not. You can see in the numbers, you know, if you're using a paperless shop type thing where, you know, time clock where you can track the time spent on each job, you know, if this is supposed to be an hour job and it takes them an hour and a half, you're watching for that lost productivity, right? You could see that, right? It's not a remote. So it's, you know, you inspect what you expect kind of a thing, right? Right. But we do have— we're seeing more and more where, you know, fleet managers are becoming more remote or you have admins that are remote. It's becoming more prevalent in the workplace. Not so much in government, but I do see this in corporate quite a bit, right? Because they have to have work-from-home policies and things of that nature. So my advice as a manager is inspect what you expect. You have to figure out how to do that for remote employees, right? And measure the output.

Yeah.

So you make sure that, you know, you're getting what you paid for that position. And honestly, if you're getting what you paid for that position, it doesn't really matter if they're working another job, right? Right? People have worked 2 jobs for decades. This is not a new thing for work from home. They usually just didn't do 'em at the same time.

Yeah, that's the key.

And I think that's the big kick.

Yeah.

Right? The second piece of this is, you know, find people who are aligned to the mission. Yeah. Who, you know, if given the opportunity to work 10 more hours for you for a little bit more money—

Would do it.

Would do it in a heartbeat because they wanna work here and not go work somewhere else. Right. Right? Not do some other mundane job just for money. They'd rather do a passion thing.

Yeah. So a few thoughts on this, right? Like, one is there's also like a trust element here too, where to your point that they're aligned with the mission, they would do the 10 hours but also have faith in their leadership that they'd be rewarded for that if they put in that extra time, if they showed the hunger, right? So that two-way street needs to really exist, right? And so like you said, that's a big part of that's the culture element of it, right? Like, I wonder if I could go to this lady and talk to both of her bosses, like, would it have been possible for her to get the total compensation that she was getting at one location or not?

I would guarantee no, right? So that's the kick on this one, right? So she was working— she had been working $120K, you know, $120K, $120,000 a year at one position.

Okay.

Um, and then I think she was at $150K at another.

Wow.

Right? So two six-figure paying jobs, right? She ended up quitting both jobs and going and finding somewhere that paid her $180,000 or something along those lines, right? But she was like, well, we were finally able to get ahead and here's all the financial reasons for doing it. And it was all the mental gymnastics, mental justification of why she was basically stealing from a company. But it was significant money. It wasn't a little bit of money, it was significant.

Here's the other thing though. I agree with your point that this is certainly more of a remote thing. Yeah, but, you know, I think about fleets and I think it's actually really, you know, what's the word? Nail on the head, right? Because like Grandpa's example, right, of the person with the stack of papers, there's a lot of that that goes on right under our nose. Right. And if you're not checking it and you don't know it and you don't understand it, then you also can't optimize for it. Right. Like he was big into spaghetti diagrams and watching people do PMs so that they can optimize for all that. Like, there's no way your company is— I don't want to say— there's no way that you're pushing your company to the levels it could be if you're not doing that kind of optimization practice. And there's no way you're doing that if you don't understand what the position is doing today. Right. So that's one thing. The other thing is a lot of fleets aren't measuring that stuff. Right. Like, and that now is actually becoming a new issue because as we're seeing this change of fleet managers who started off on the shop floor to fleet managers who are coming in from other industries. Oh, they have no idea how long it takes to change a set of brakes or even to change oil. Right. Absolutely.

You told me that one story.

Yeah.

You were at a garage and the foreman kept walking by. Oh, no. Yeah. Like, it's not done yet.

Right.

And he was talking about a Camry or something.

Yes, it was a Toyota Camry. And the mechanic says to him, yeah, we're still waiting on these air brakes to come in.

And if you don't get that joke, This could be happening to you, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And here's the punchline: Camrys don't have air brakes, right? That's heavy-duty equipment kind of stuff. And they were totally pulling the wool on this guy's eyes because he didn't know the job and he didn't know how long it took. Yeah. And we're not saying you have to be a shop, you know, you don't have to be a mechanic to become a fleet manager, right? But you do have to study and you have to be aware, right? And go out and just watch. You know, we talk about management by walking around a lot.

Yeah.

Which is a benefit we have for in-person positions. But that's what you do is you just have to walk around and learn through osmosis and asking questions and being willing to look like an idiot.

Yeah.

To figure out what's going on, what's real, what's not.

Yeah.

You know, this is the only way you're going to figure out what's up from down.

Yeah. If you talk to Tony or Steve or any of our consultants in that, you know, I walk into a shop and I know right away if it's productive, like within seconds. Yeah, there's a buzz. There is a buzz that productive shops happen. I mean, you hear it, it's the air gun, this is this clanking, this noise, okay? And I can't tell you how many shops I've walked into and it's just, it's quiet.

Yes, that's such a dead giveaway, you know?

And it's like, what's going on?

And then I sit down with the leadership and it's not lunch break either, right?

Right, exactly. You know, you check for that, right? You know, it's not— and now I remember walking in major— I won't say the name of the company, you know, major construction firm, national company. Everyone would know the name if I said it. And I walk into one of their locations and there's no buzz. And I sit down with that local manager and I'm like, hey, you know, so what's going on here? You know, how do you feel you guys are doing and all? Oh, we're great. We're doing this and we're so productive. And, you know, turns out that guy was, you know, not only did he have no background in fleet, he just wasn't even really interested in it.

He was going to say his buddies. He was about to take.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, spent a lot of time making videos and playing music and stuff, literally in his office right there with him.

So, so it's not a new issue.

It's not a new issue and it's not going away, unfortunately, either, you know.

Well, and even for those in-person things, like you think about the technician example, if you don't know how long a job should take, you're not using SRTs or anything like that, how do you ever know, like, you know, that tech really could just be sitting around? And if you're not doing management while we're walking around, you're not going to see that.

That's key.

Or if they just go a little bit slower, they're just not hustling.

Yes.

You're just not going to see that.

That's key. This is why we always say data has context.

Yeah.

Because you need to leverage the data, folks. But then you need to do the observation. You need to get out there because you know what? You could have all your— I've seen this before too, where mechanics know how to, you know, rig the system. So they go slow. And now their SRT says an oil change should take 4 hours because they understand what's going on. Right. So That's so key that you have to watch too. You can't replace the effort. You got to put in the effort ultimately, right? Um, and I think you're right. I think there's a lot of, you know, lazy management. You know, we love to curse on a podcast because we have a colleague here who calls it something else. It's both lazy and scared management.

I do, but then we get like the little E explicit rating.

All right, well, I'll just say chicken S-word management. You know, where it's part of that because this is where my mind went when you mentioned that this woman is getting these great reviews, like, right, either these managers are dumb and right, or they're just scared to have hard conversations. So one of those two had to be true there, right?

So it's like, wow, you know, but we usually like, we have a little running joke, which is, you know, we look for culture fits. We look for people who are humble, who are hungry, and who are smart. And one of our running jokes is, look, if you're not coming here to hustle and you don't want to grind and you just want to kind of fly under the radar and coast, Wells Fargo's just a mile down the road. Get up out of there, right? Because it's this concept of, you know, there's a bunch of— you can go hide in a big corporation anywhere you want. It's true. You're going to get exposed, so don't try it.

It's not for you.

Like, this lady would have never gotten away with that. In fact, we had an employee, uh, this was during COVID so we were all working remote. Right when we said, hey, it's time to come back into the office, he quit. And we come to find out that he was working 2 jobs.

There it is.

And then I come to find out that his manager at the time wasn't doing a good job managing him. And so he wasn't tracking the number of calls he was making. He wasn't tracking the number of deals he was putting through. Right. This is a salesperson. He was selling something else. And, you know, he just basically was using us for the benefits and the base pay. Yeah. That type of mediocre performance It was not on this guy. Yeah, it was 100% on the manager.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, it was a conversation he and I had. I believe he got written up for that, if I remember right. But that's the kind of stuff that you have to manage out. You can't tolerate that type of thing. You have to set a bar and then hold that.

Right.

And when you see people are clearing the bar, then raise the bar and reward them appropriately.

Right, right. And before all the sales professionals kill us in the comments, we are not 100% commission sales. We pay our salespeople some— there's some base in it. Yeah. So we expect that time, right? So yeah.

Well, so there was another example and I thought this was actually brilliant where I didn't fault this person at all, but it was a software engineer and he got 3 jobs, fully remote software engineering jobs.

Okay.

But he outsourced 2 of them to a Chinese developer. Why? And you're thinking, oh my gosh, this is totally unethical, right? But he totally did. He, you know, one of them was working for Microsoft, one was somewhere else. And he basically hired— he outsourced and hired somebody else for him. And he was effectively his own subcontractor.

Right.

Hey, if that's what you want to do, then you do it, right?

It's— if I remember the story right too, he paid these folks very well.

That was the kick, right? He was paying them handsomely and he was basically just, you know, just like a subcontractor would, paying them the meat of the wage.

Right.

And just keeping some for himself.

Keep the balance.

Now, obviously he probably had to do some quality control checks and things like that. There's a whole host of legal issues that we could get into.

Yeah. And security issues.

Copyright, security, right? Yeah. You know, you've got Chinese developers working on, you know, national security projects. Can you imagine? Yeah, you'd lose security clearance pretty quick there. But this idea of, um, hey, if you can, you know, if you can make $150,000 doing a job and you can pay somebody else $120,000 to do an acceptable job on your behalf, okay, like, I'm not mad at that. That's entrepreneurial, right? Right, right. I mean, it's effectively what any business owner does, is you hire people to do jobs and then you charge more for than what it costs. That's profit.

That's how you make money.

I just don't like the idea of misrepresenting that.

Right.

Because that's the ethical thing, is that if you're telling people that you're working there and then you're not really working there, you don't have the subject matter expertise, you're not providing that.

Right.

And then you put that on your resume.

Yeah, we have a system in place for that, right? Like, you can, you can be a 1099 employee, you can, or you can, or like you said, you could subcontract that work. That's different.

But just be honest about it.

But that's honest, right?

Yeah.

To take it as a salaried position.

Yeah. With pennies.

Yeah, there's no way he was paying those folks pennies, for sure.

Right.

So, wow, that's mind-boggling, especially in software, because, you know, in today's world with the hacking and the security and the spy network and all this jazz that you read about all the time—

it's crazy world—

kind of scary, really.

This is the world we live in. Yeah. So with all that being said, inspect what you expect, right? Know how long the job takes. Manage by walking around, right? We call that getting your MBWA.

Yeah.

You know, get out there and be out and be present. And you'll hear it, right? When you walk out on the shop floor, is the shop buzzing? If you walked out on the shop floor, you just listened to this episode, it's 10 o'clock in the morning. What's your shop floor sound like?

Right.

There should be noise.

There should be a buzz.

Yeah.

Yeah. You might give coffee breaks and that, you know, I know shops, fine, but there should be a noise.

No, because you and I both have, we've walked into shops that are dead quiet.

Dead.

Like, oh, Or maybe you guys are just short on technicians. I could see that.

Yeah.

You only have one tech and you've got 4 open positions.

Right.

Okay. Makes sense. We get it. But no, we walk in and there's 5 techs on the floor right then.

Yeah.

And it's quiet.

Quiet as heck.

Yeah. Something's wrong. Yep.

Yeah.

All right. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. As always, we love hearing your comments, feedback. Know anybody who's been double dipping or, you know, as we call it, over-employing themselves? You know, love to hear from you. podcast@rtafleet.com. But as always, it's been a pleasure.

All right. See you later, everyone.