Doing side gigs only makes sense if the employee can pursue their genuine interests outside of work
Imagine that your application for a teaching position has been rejected by a number of universities and educational institutions in Europe. You advertise private lessons, but no students show up. You settle for a job as a third-division clerk at a patent office, reading patent applications from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., six days a week. At home, your marriage is in trouble. And yet you publish no fewer than five theoretical articles on science, three of which will breathe new life into physics for another century. That was Einstein in 1905. He was a technical expert – class III at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern between 1902 and 1909, and without access to scientific instruments, literature, colleagues or inspiration. He was all alone, consumed with his thought experiments. By today's standards of work culture, Einstein was a side hustle.
Every few months there's a storm in a teacup about moonlighting – or working another job while having a steady job. The term hit the news shortly after the pandemic, when working from home became the norm and employees logged in without supervision from their bosses. Is it indeed “cheating” as some leaders have stated? It depends on what you do; if you do the exact same work for a competitor, it's wrong. But if the side job is a creative pursuit that gives you a chance to make history, why not?
Steve Wozniak created the future of Apple years before leaving HP to co-found the company with Steve Jobs. He would develop new hardware and systems that had no direct relevance to the HP of the time. In the late 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee took on the side job of automating information sharing among scientists at universities and institutes around the world, leading to the creation of the World Wide Web. If there is a pent-up creative capacity that cannot be adequately channeled by the employer, the person must be able to do justice to this.
There are three circumstances under which moonlighting makes sense and should in fact be encouraged. First, when an employee's talent is not fully utilized or developed, the employee should be given the opportunity to take on additional tasks within or outside the formal setup. After all, it is the employer's responsibility to tap the resources, otherwise they risk having the assets erode. It is not only about utilizing talent, but also about development and improvement through fame. Mythologist and writer Devdutt Pattanaik spent his early years at Sanofi Aventis and Apollo Group of Hospitals, where he honed his skills as a writer, in addition to his day job as a doctor. This allowed him to build a creative career for himself and entertain and inform a large number of readers.
Second, when the cause for which the employee works is broader than the immediate interest or relevance of the company. If an employee creates a solution that could change the paradigm of the market as a whole, the company should be willing to fund such an endeavor. That's how Intel encouraged its engineer, Ajay Bhatt, to create the USB standard that not only benefited the company's ability to interoperate with other devices, but also became an industry standard for data communications. It wasn't exactly what Intel, the chipmaker, was known for.
Third, additional income provides a large investment if the employee helps the company develop new skills and competencies. If an employee works in a similar area where the company excels, what does the company learn from it? It is a circular flow of knowledge. It is possible that the employee develops new competencies through a side gig that become mainstream in the organization. In this way the company can transform to be ready for the future.
The initial experiments that Amazon's internal IT team did with its infrastructure and computing capacity laid the foundation for AWS, which has become the company's biggest profit driver. All these types of experiments were set up years before the company made a profit from its core activities.
Side gigs or additional income make sense if the employee can pursue a genuine interest outside of work. When it comes to making a quick buck, doing the same job in a similar setup, it is rightly criticized, but not all moonlight is bad. Who knows if the next Einstein is sitting in a cubicle down the hall, hiding his creations from you? It's time you let such talent run free without becoming insecure.
Pavan Soni is the founder of Inflexion Point, an innovation and strategy consultancy. He is the author of Design your thinking: the mindsets, tools, and skills for creative problem solving.