Startups Anonymous Est. 2013 · Read-only archive
Questions

What should I do about my moonlighting employee?

I have an employee at my startup, and he is moonlighting. He doesn’t make any effort to hide it, and generally I haven’t paid attention. He is paid under market, so I get why he needs extra income. He does have some stock options though, but not too many.

That said, he isn’t always producing good work, and takes a lot of time off, compared to other employees.

I would have just let it go, since they are fairly inexpensive and do an adequate job, some times, but they just asked for a raise.

There’s no way I’m giving a raise, but just trying to decide if we should just terminate them and move on, or put up with it.

4 answers from the community

AAnonymous· Jul 21, 2015

Your employee doesn't think he has a future and room for personal growth at your company, so he's looking elsewhere. You can't expect people to be really dedicated when the job is kind of crummy and unchallenging.

So try to figure out why he's not motivated, and see if you can fix it. And if he starts doing good work, then he deserves to get compensated fairly. You have a cultural problem, and firing people won't fix that.

AAnonymous· Jul 22, 2015

+1

AAnonymous· Jul 23, 2015

Maybe he is helping someone to hit a goal. I had a friend do that for me. He has zero intentions of leaving his paid startup gig.

AAnonymous· Jul 23, 2015

Have you told them why you think their work is not always up to par? You sound generally satisfied with their work, but in your eyes it's not perfect.

Let them know what they can do to make their work better. They likely think they're doing a great job, which is why they've asked for a raise.

It's obviously important to you that an employee only hold down one job at a time -- is that in your employment agreement? If not, maybe you should add it in if it bothers you. Otherwise your employees have no idea they're doing anything wrong.

Communicate, communicate, communicate.