Your Employee Has Two Full-Time Jobs? W/Tracy Simek - We're not recording S2E03

There is a new trend that came up during the pandemic with many people working remotely of, uh, surreptitiously working two jobs, full-time jobs.

Welcome to today's episode of We're Not Recording, where we chat with Tracy Simek, CPO at Locus Robotics. And today we talk all about what to do if you find out your employee is working a second job. Is it okay or is it a problem? And of course, don't forget to subscribe so you can stay up to date with all our latest episodes. And of course, I need to mention Athena, the company that pays for my salary. If you are looking for a better way to do compliance training, check us out. Tracy, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for the invitation. It's great to meet with you, Melanie. I've really been looking forward to this.

Same here. I was, of course, stalking your LinkedIn profile beforehand because I was like, all right, I gotta be prepared, I gotta see all the things. And I saw that you have been at your current company, um, for going on 9 years. Is that— is that so?

It is, yeah. It's been a great run too, a lot of evolution. It's been really fun both for the company and then for my career during that time because we've grown. We've not been stable state, we've been in, uh, a startup, and it's been wonderful to grow my career along with the company as well.

I saw you've had quite a few promotions in your time there. Tell us, for the audience, for myself, tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got to your company, what you're doing now, and what it's like being there for going on 9 years.

Sure. So, you know, I got started working in blue-collar work, and I think one of our questions will talk a little bit about that. But You know, at the end of the time that I was doing that, I was working for a company that did legal services out in Seattle, and they realized that they didn't have a way to recruit the people who did the work on the ground for the vast majority of the company. And they were at the time going through a massive expansion, acquiring small mom-and-pop businesses across the country and pulling them into one large, one large services provider that was national and international. So at that time, they had an opening for a recruiter inside, but they wanted to have somebody from inside the organization because they again couldn't figure out how to quantify and qualify what made the best process server, people who serve legal papers in the company. So I applied for the job and got it. And then I ran a— I did a study on from the managers what qualified the best servers from their perspective and then quantified the success rate of the servers and then mixed that data together and created a recruiting plan to hire the best servers as we went through this period of rapid expansion. And then we hired an absolute ridiculous number of these folks over the next— I should say contracted. It wasn't really hired. They were 1099s, but we contracted them over the next 14 months or so. And then from there, after that, I moved back to New England where I'm from and went into corporate recruiting. Well, I went into agency recruiting, then it went into corporate. And I got some exposure to HR during that time. And I really liked HR. And there's a lot, a lot of great work that can be done in the people function and found that to really be my calling. So working with the next company that I worked at, I worked in managing HR systems and working with my, my director of HR and then grew through working at iRobot as a recruiter again for a little bit and got some great exposure to international recruiting and HR as we set up a new office in China. And then my old boss from the prior company called me when we were coming into the, when he was at Locus, and we were, he was getting ready to build the company out and take it to the next level. And then I was employee number 38 here and came in to really start the talent acquisition and HR function native to the company, 'cause it had spun out from another company and it had HR that it was sort of half-time for both companies before they separated. So, I took it over there and then really was, you know, helped build HR and a recruiting program here. And then have been lucky enough to be with the company throughout all of our evolution as we've grown from 38 to just under 500 now.

That is wild. I remember at my last company, we had a similar trajectory, a little bit different stage. I went from 200 to over 1,000 in the 7 years that I was there. And my God, every year it was just a different company. It's a different culture. You go from knowing every employee's name to being like, wait, We hired that person when it just changes everything.

Exactly. It really does. And the exciting thing for us was that the vast majority of that growth happened during the pandemic. So we went into the pandemic, like 2020, we had just under 100 people coming out of the pandemic. Just 2 years later, we had like 400 plus. And then after that, we, we grew up to almost 500. Then we had downsized a little bit and then have continued growing after that.

That's wild. What do you think enabled your company to thrive during the pandemic? Peak pandemic when other companies were furloughing people.

For a brief intro, I am the Chief People Officer of Locus Robotics, and Locus is a warehouse automation provider, the premier AI-enabled warehouse automation provider in the space of helping people to pick orders that are being shipped to people in an e-commerce context. So what we do is have robots that help warehouse owners to ship things more effectively by using the systems and the people and the equipment that they have rather than having to retrofit their entire warehouse for a giant new system that's going to take the place of their previous infrastructure. So during the pandemic, obviously with a lot of stuff being ordered online, people staying home, that blew everybody in our business's business through the roof. And then we had a little contraction after that as the market tried to correct itself. But now, it looks like things are coming out of the gate, getting strong again.

The more time that I spend in HR, the more I realize how important people's backgrounds before they even entered the workforce matters to the way that they come to work. So, I've got a more personal question for you. And then, we'll kick it off with our usual podcast questions. Are you ready to get a little vulnerable here, Tracy? I'm ready. Okay. If you could change anything about the way you grew up, what would it be?

So this is an interesting one for me, and I was very privileged to grow up with a very happy, happy childhood. I grew up in rural Massachusetts on the Southeast Coast. I think the one thing that was challenging for me was that I grew up in the '70s and '80s. And during that time, the diagnosis of people who have things like ADHD and dyslexia was not where it is today. And I, I did have a learning disability growing up that was undiagnosed, and that challenged my schoolwork quite a bit. And that led me to not really get into college until later in my career. So when I was coming out of that time working in blue-collar work, I had a great career in that and I met so many great friends and had so many, so much great experience both as an individual contributor and a manager. But, you know, I think the one thing that I would change, and it's one of the things that we try to help people with in Locus Robotics Foundation, is having that issue have been identified a little bit earlier. You know, we could have changed my trajectory. I could have gotten into college earlier and then, you know, done something different. But with that being said, I don't want to minimize the time that I had in my 20s when I was working in blue collar in the legal services and the messenger industry. Because it was a wonderful time and I grew so much throughout that time, made so many great friends and had so many great working experiences. But I do think that's probably, if I could change one thing, that might be one of the things that I would take a look at.

What changed once you got your diagnosis? How did you change the way that you—

Absolutely nothing. Okay.

Really?

It just essentially was, uh, oh, okay, well that explains a lot. And then it allowed me to sort of focused, like when I have, you know, it allowed me to put things into a different context and be able to work more effectively with the way that my brain works, you know, but it's not, it's not a big deal and it's never been a big deal to me after getting out of school. The big one that I had was not so much the ADHD, but I had extraordinary dyslexia when I was growing up to the point where when I was younger, I literally thought I had, there were like 32 or 36 letters in the alphabet. And that was really challenging for me early on. But now it's just something that I know and deal with.

Oh, that's fascinating. Okay. But it does sound like you have found ways to work with your learning disability, if I'm understanding correctly. What are some tips for anyone?

It's a superpower sometimes. Like everybody says that nobody— I've heard many times that nobody can multitask. Well, I can tell you I can multitask, you know, to varying levels of effectiveness, but I do it fairly well. You know, and it also, I think, allows you a creative freedom and a way to think about things that other people may not have who are not from a cognitively diverse background. It's one of the things we like to do at Locus is to help train our managers on how to work with people who have, who are, you know, have, you know, cognitive diversity in a variety of different contexts. And we have several people as we've rolled out programs to help train our managers. And provide different types of services for folks. We've found that many of our professionals working with us, especially at the high level, absolutely have these, have cognitive diversity going on in one form or another. And it's helpful to talk about it, to have people who can share that experience with you and not, to try to dispel the stigma that comes from that. And I think that's super important is for people to understand that other people have it, that you're able to be successful, whatever the it is, whatever your circumstances may be. And that you can use it as a superpower and be able to work around the challenges that you face, but then really lean into the advantages that it provides you versus other people. For example, and you may know this, you may sort of sympathize with this in HR. I think there are a lot of people who need to, and especially in our field, need to come in and have structure because we work with compliance. We work with, you know, things that have to be done a certain way. A lot of HR professionals tend to like structure. And for things to move in an orderly fashion. I'm wired for chaos. I'm always looking to solve problems. I'm ready when things go sideways. Yesterday, for example, we had one of the most extraordinary challenges that I've ever— I think I've ever seen in HR, and we dealt with it very effectively and able to move on and continue the work. And that's one of those things that helps, I think, you to use the cognitive diversity to your advantage versus some of the negative effects that you may have.

Wait, Tracy, what can you tell us about this firestorm? Not leaking anything confidential, but just what area of things was it? Was it like employee experience? Was it compliance? Is there a thing that you can tell us?

It was related to— it was related to a challenge that many employers have had during the time of the pandemic where we rapidly expanded and had to hire people throughout Uh, throughout the country, and, uh, the vetting standards may have changed a little bit, uh, during that time. And you may have hired people who may not be up to the standard or may have other challenges that you would normally— would not normally have hired during that time. Uh, so we find that there was a miss someplace, and we had a very unique situation that was very exciting and quite different.

Okay, well, I'm sure many people could relate. I know at Athena, when I first joined, our interview process was such that we also were unfortunately, I think, both not filtering appropriately, but also not setting the right expectations about what it is like to work at Athena. And therefore, we hired a lot of mismatches. I never think an employee is bad or not a good performer. I think sometimes they're just not a good match. For that company and vice versa. And so, we had a similar situation where we had a period of several months where we had to make decisions about who we realized was no longer a good match and what we were going to do moving forward in the interview process to ensure that we got better matches moving forward.

May I ask you a question?

Yeah, please.

I'll give you a bit more detail because I'm curious to see if you've seen this and it may have other people who are listening to the podcast that say, oh, I've seen that before. So there is a new trend that came up during the pandemic with many people working remotely of surreptitiously working two jobs, full-time jobs. Now, I'm not talking about hustling because I'm all about hustling. Many times in my life, especially previous to the 15 years that I've been in HR, I had a night hustle and a day hustle, right? I did the job all day long and I did something else at night to make extra money, to work, try to develop a second career, whatever the case may be. I have no problem with that whatsoever. But in this case, I'm I'm talking about representing that you work full-time for Company A to Company A, and then you represent that you work full-time at Company B to Company B, and sometimes even to Company C, right? So this creates a unique challenge for us in HR because that person who is doing that has signed NDAs with multiple different companies and may have access to multiple different, uh, you know, pieces of information at all of those companies, and that creates a unique challenge. So have you experienced that, Melanie, or heard from other professionals who have?

So I have not personally experienced it, but I have prepared for it and had many conversations about it. And I'll tell you where my— what my stance is and what Athena's stance is. So at Athena, similar to what you said, we are very happy to have people do side hustles because realistically, in our opinion, as long as they are not conflicts of interest You stopping someone from doing a side hustle if they're doing their job really, one, isn't your business, and two, isn't actually going to retain that employee. That employee is going to quit.

And I want that person. That person motivated. That's a hustler, an entrepreneur.

A go-getter.

That's who I want.

1,000%. An employee who's going to do their job and then on top of that, they want to do this other thing. And you as their employer give them that freedom to do that and pursue other avenues of their career, of their interests, make more money. Go for it. They're going to be so happy. They're probably going to be less worried about getting the biggest possible increase because they've got multiple sources of income. So we have no issues with that as long as the person discloses it so that we are able to validate that it is in fact not a conflict of interest.

Now— Same with Lucas Robotics. Yes.

1,000%. Now, you would think that the argument would carry over to a full-time job, right? Who cares if I've got two full-time jobs? I'm doing my job at Job A. And I'm doing my job at Job B. I'm just that good that I can do both of them. And here's where I stand on that. One, I have yet to hear of anyone who has openly admitted this to their employer. So that's problem one, which is unfortunately, if you lie or if you lie by omission, by hiding something, that's its own problem. That is in violation of our company values. So that's one. The second thing is, let's say you did come to us in good faith and you said, hey, Melanie, I just got offered another full-time job and I think I can do both. Here's my very honest response. I think that if you have so much free time that you can take on another full-time job, you are not giving enough to one of those two jobs. And here's why I feel that way. I know people might argue, Melanie, what are you talking about? It's about the impact. It's about the output, not the input, not how many hours they work, because I talk about this all the time. This is true, but especially at a startup like ours, um, where we are all hustling so hard, if you are working fewer than 6 hours a day— and that— this is what I mean when I tell you we've talked about it. We were like, well, how few hours in a day would we have a problem with it, right? Like, you could take an hour lunch, maybe you have a slow day, but if you are working consistently fewer than 6 hours in a day, to me, you are letting your teammates down. Because everyone else on your team is struggling and you should be offering a leg up, not working even fewer hours to take on a second job. We pay you to do a full-time job at a startup, not to do the bare minimum and then take on a second job. Let me pause. What goes through your mind as I say that? And do you have a different perspective?

I agree 100%. And here's the thing. At Locus, we are in it to win it. We're creating something unique, which is why I work here. I'm lucky enough to work at places that I want to work at, and I choose to work at places that are interesting to me. And we have a mission to build something completely unique and revolutionize the warehouse industry. No person working at Locus is going to be able to do that if they're doing this and then committing to some other mission for somebody else. You know, aside from the challenges of commingling work on laptops and everything else that goes along with that, there's no way that you're going to be giving everything to both companies at the same time. And the challenge for me as an HR professional that cares about the people that work, a true people professional that works, that cares about the people that work at Locus, is that a lot of the stuff that we do is to help people create a holistic work-life balance and help them as much as you can in a startup, but to help them enjoy the time that they have off so that they're not burning out. One of my big issues that I work with at Locus is to help people avoid burning out and to create a work situation that allows them to work hard, be fulfilled, but then also have valuable time off. And if you're overleveraging your work time like that, you're on a path that's not going to be healthy for you. I get that people are very money-focused. It's just Locus is not the place that, that we're going to help you get to that place. If you need to earn two full-time incomes, there's probably other places that can allow that.

And here's what I love about what you just said. You didn't castigate it like, that is a bad thing if you work two jobs. You said it— that means that this company is not the right company for you. And I think that's exactly right. I'm sure that somebody could make that work somewhere else, but not here. And I think that that is the only thing a company is responsible for, um, when it comes to, you know, giving employees what they want. I don't actually think our job is to give employees what they want. I think our job is to be honest about what kind of company you are or aren't so that that employee can make a more well-informed decision about whether or not you are or aren't the right company for them. Yeah.

And here's the thing about our culture that I tell people, because I've had people ask me, so what's, what's the culture of Locus? It's about who works well at Locus. And it's a— the thing that we need is people who have a life commitment to lifelong learning To the point that I said earlier, they're always looking, okay, great, we succeeded, fantastic, let's celebrate that. But what's next? We have more challenges to solve, more opportunities to build the business going forward. And that's what I want to promote. You're not going to do that with somebody who is doing the bare minimum at 2 jobs to just be able to check in and tick the boxes at 2 different jobs so that they can pull both paychecks. That's not what, what's going to work here. So I prefer not— prefer that we don't go through the experience of trying to find this together. I'll just tell you up front that that's not what's going to work out with us.

Totally. Tracy, I know we are coming up on time, so let me end it with a New Year's related question. As we head into the new year, I imagine lots of people are coming up with their resolutions, their goals for the year. What is one thing that you hope to level up in the new year?

I hope to continue growing my HR skills for the next step of Locus. So I am never going to be the person that says that I am perfectly prepared for every moment in my professional career. And I've said this a couple of times over the last few months as we've been talking about career development opportunities for people at Locus. Yeah, uh, am I the right person for Locus right now? I, I feel like I am professionally skilled to be the right person. Am I the right person for a 5,000-person company with global, you know, global reach, like multiple thousands of people across the world? Not now. I, I will be. I want to be. But right now, at this moment in time, that I'm, I'm probably not all the way there. And that's what I want to grow into into. So as I go into this year, those are the opportunities that I'm looking for. Um, you know, I'm looking to get more professional certifications and then work more, particularly this year, on, uh, strategic global HR management. We already have significant people outside the United States, uh, a little over 100 around the world. I think we're in 17 different countries right now. But I'd like to learn more about the challenges and the opportunities that are there, more about compliance in those areas, and then also about areas that we really aren't in. We have a lot of folks in Europe and in Canada, some in Mexico. We're looking to expand into Asia at the APAC region. And, you know, that's the part that I really am not well-rounded in, and that's what I want to level up to this year.

Well, I'm so excited for all the things that you have ahead of you, Tracy. I'm going to be following along on your journey. I can't wait to see you all expand, and thank you so much for sharing part of your story with us today here.

Thanks, Melanie. I really appreciate it. It's been great to talk to you and great to hear about Athena as well.

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