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Patrick Synge fired one of his employees for secretly working a second remote job while he was at work.
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He explained how he caught the employee and why he decided to fire him.
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He says overtime is sometimes “unethical” and can hurt employee productivity.
This as told essay is based on an email conversation with Patrick Synge, the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of the business process outsourcing and remote recruiting company Metrickal. The company has its headquarters in Barcelona and has 10 full-time, fully remote workforce, in addition to more than 200 contractors worldwide. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I am the co-founder and CCO of a company where every employee works completely remotely. In January, I caught one of them secretly working a second full-time job remotely.
Here’s how it all went down – and why I decided to fire them.
My company is headquartered in Barcelona, but one of my employees was based in Peru. He was hired in 2022 and he did his job very well at first. But then I started receiving complaints from customers about missed assignments and deadlines. He also became completely unresponsive. These client complaints began to become somewhat regular.
When this employee started refusing certain shifts he normally worked, I became suspicious. I had a feeling he was doing something, but since there was no evidence, I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
So instead, I had one-on-one meetings with him to discuss his job performance. When the same problems persisted, I told him that if things didn’t change, I would have to let him go.
Although he showed some signs of improvement, his overall performance did not change much. This placed a significant burden on the rest of the team, who had to cover his services and deal with missed deadlines.
In December, apart from this specific employee, my company rolled out time tracking software DeskTime.
My long-term goal is to implement a four-day work week in my company, and I decided that the first step in this process would be to understand how my employees spend their time and what can be optimized to increase productivity.
That’s why our entire team of full-time employees and freelancers started using DeskTime. They all had to install the app on their computers so that everyone was well aware that this was being implemented.
After a few weeks, I looked at the struggling employee’s tracking data and noticed that the name of another company – a US company – appeared regularly in the data. It became clear to me that this employee had worked on tasks for another company.
