It can be helpful to step back and remember what you’re creating together with your team:

• A service people need
• A product that delights
• An unforgettable experience
• Value for your shareholders
• A place (physical or virtual) to come together and make stuff happen
• A shared and utterly unique workplace experience

If you stop and think about it, an organization – even the most dysfunctional one – is kind of magical. Strangers who may have nothing in common but their work come together and create something brand-new from their skills, talents, and knowledge. That particular combination of people has never existed before, and will never exist again.

You become colleagues. Sometimes friends. Sometimes more (and, it must be said, sometimes less – far less). But you are all in it together, working toward a common purpose. You become more than the sum of your parts as individuals.

The next time you get frustrated by a credit-grabber or back-stabber or lunchtime-sandwich-stealer, take a step back. You’re in a singular experience. And you take from it what you put into it.

Now, none of this means you should stay in a bad work situation longer than you absolutely have to. But it’s important to remember that work always offers us the opportunity to learn, grow, and excel, sometimes even despite ourselves.

Remember the magic…even as you keep an eye out for sandwich-snatchers.

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I recently read a fascinating article on what’s known as “overemployed” workers – folks secretly holding down two (or more) full-time jobs. I think a better term for this would be “extreme moonlighting” – or maybe “work bigamy.”

In any event, if this is going on at your workplace, it’s completely your fault. Let me explain:

1. If you are supervising an employee so poorly that you think they’re crushing it, but they’re actually working on your company’s tasks just a few hours a week, that’s on you.
2. If an employee is struggling, for whatever reason, and you haven’t worked with them to rectify the situation, that’s on you.
3. If you don’t have a policy explicitly barring employees from taking on one or more additional full-time jobs, that’s on you.
4. If you do have such a policy but aren’t monitoring or enforcing it, that’s on you.

It’s a safe bet that these workers are remote, or hybrid at best, but this isn’t actually a work-from-home issue. It’s a management issue.

Employees who don’t have enough to fill their allotted full-time hours should of course be raising their hands and saying so, but this doesn’t always happen (especially if an employee is getting terrific reviews, keeping everyone happy, and already being credited for going above and beyond the call of duty).

If someone is actually pulling this off so successfully that you have no clue, they are either vastly underutilized or extremely talented (perhaps both). Either way, the solution is better, more attentive supervision.

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