Are Some of Your Best Employees
Hiding Second Jobs?
‘Dualling’
refers not to simple moonlighting or after-hours gig work,
but to employees being on the clock during regular working hours for multiple
employers, none of whom have any idea of the situation.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V
AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Dec 23,
2025
A long time ago,
when I was operating large-scale call centers making millions of calls
each year to the customers of dozens of major enterprises—car manufacturers,
hotel and restaurant chains, hospitals and other health providers—our technology
was nowhere near as advanced as we see now from AI-powered call
center businesses such as Balto, which I first wrote about in 2021. But even in
the pre-A.I. dark ages, we knew that building intelligent inbound
call routing and distribution systems and adaptive scripts based on
the origin of each call was essential.
Having the front-end
call management systems instantly route customer inquiries based on
the inbound number they had called was a way to accomplish
two critical operating objectives: (a) team members answering calls could use
the variable script displayed on his or her desktop to respond to calls
effectively and convincingly regardless of whether they were from a customer of
Honda or Hilton, and (b) this system kept every team member gainfully employed
and fully occupied almost all day long rather than having employees
sitting around waiting for calls to come in solely from the customers of a
single client. Needless to say, within reasonable
guardrails and even with fairly narrow client preferences
and procedures, the manner in which any given call was
handled and the conversations themselves rarely varied much between
our many clients.
I should add that this
system also permitted the team members to
be located anywhere in the world and in alternative time
zones in order to enable 24/7 answers and responses.
However, as we have all experienced, callers often don’t like having their
questions addressed by team members with language challenges or even
simply different accents than they anticipated and expected.
This is why companies such as Krisp now provide A.I.-driven natural accent
conversion tools and other features like noise cancellation
for call centers. Their text-to-voice tools also permit rapid
detailed responses by the team members to complex issues. One piece of
good news for consumers is that the FCC in 2024 barred outbound telemarketers
from using A.I.-created voice messages.
And, with the explosion
of remote work—estimated at 36 million employees by the end of
2025—and the gig economy in general, thousands of men and women are now
providing these kinds of services from the comfort of their own homes. In
fact, all of this new technology and the
accompanying changed behaviors may mean the end entirely of large and
costly call centers which can now be virtualized and
staffed on demand with variable overhead.
I was reminded
of all of these staffing conversations and concerns at a
recent board meeting where we received a report from our HR team
on dualling. No, not dueling, but dualling, which relates to employees having more than
one job at the same time and sometimes as many as three or four employers,
none of whom, of course, have any idea of the situation. This is not
simple moonlighting or after-hours gig work, it’s employees
who are discovered to be on the clock during regular working hours for
multiple firms. Equifax euphemistically calls this “being
overemployed” with more than one full-time job.
The report, which
was based on a service now being provided and marketed aggressively by
Equifax with the unbelievably clunky name “Talent Report Work
Inform” (which feels like ChatGPT had serious indigestion that day), reminds
all of us that the federal government isn’t the only group
sneaking around and minding everyone else’s business.
The theoretical premise here is that dual employment may
compromise a company’s security or trade secrets, but we all know that no
employer enjoys feeling like they’ve been tricked or suckered
into overpaying an employee for time not spent on company business. Here
again, it’s important to avoid thinking about the Director of
the FBI flying on company planes for dates, concerts and sporting events
all over the country on our dime.
In any
event, that is what it is for now, but the more important
question for entrepreneurs and other business operators is not
regarding Patel—who we know is a worthless clown—but is whether the
typical knee jerk reaction of booting the “bad” employees (which
Equifax did very publicly a while ago using its own service on its own
people) is the smartest action for the companies to take, or whether they
need to take a longer and more considered look at the overall
situation on a per-person basis.
Maybe these team members
are talented, hard-working and high-performing employees who have the passion
and commitment required to handle both of two tough jobs
well (in these horrible economic times) and are making more valuable
and substantial contributions to the company’s success and results than
the less motivated folks who punch in and punch out on the clock
with depressing regularity but don’t get much done during the day while
they’re there. Good entrepreneurs know that it takes all kinds of employees
to build a great business and, these days, regular office hours are
rarely much of an indicator of anything. It’s a case-by-case call and
a complicated set of conversations, but it’s never going to be simply
and easily resolved solely by numbers in a report.
We want talent and
creativity, but when it comes to the other oddities that
are usually associated with these traits and perhaps are
essential to them, we often forget that good people are a package
deal—warts, work styles and habits—and rather than trying to
understand and reasonably accommodate the differences, we tend too
often to profess to not understand or appreciate them at all, and give
them no room or opportunity to prove their merits and worth.
