Your Star Employee Has Another Job
One in four workers now have a side hustle, including a growing number who find the second gig more engaging than their ‘real’ job. How is that affecting productivity?
The worker’s main job may be as a VP in marketing, but you’d never know it from his daily schedule: mornings developing a script for his next influencer post; lunchtimes spent filming it; and evenings spent posting on Instagram and tracking the results. Come bedtime, he wonders if his boss—at his “real” job—has noticed how far he’s fallen behind.
One in four Americans now have a side hustle, according to 2025 figures from Bankrate—and thanks to the power of AI, those businesses are growing far faster, and offering more opportunities, than any business owner or side-hustling employee could have imagined just five years ago. These gigs range from researching a book to getting a medical degree to becoming an influencer, and experts say the trend is attracting even some of companies’ star employees. It’s not exactly what most firms have in mind for their workforce, and many leaders are struggling to respond effectively. “Intuitively, many managers are concerned about lower productivity, focus, and engagement,” says Kendra Marion, vice president of global assessment services at Korn Ferry.
Unlike the side hustles of the aughts, today’s double-employed workers are often seeking passive-income streams through pursuits like real-estate investing or creating hyper-niche products for online sale. Their goals are not just economic, though: In a climate in which they fear AI could soon take their roles, the underlying purpose is often long-term security. “People feel like the company is not loyal to them, so they need to be self-sustaining,” says Lisa Harrison, senior client partner at Korn Ferry.
Corporate experts see another motivation: employees’ inability to see a meaningful way forward at their current company. Sure, the job is fine now, but is it going anywhere? For many, the answer is no: 65% of people feel “stuck” in their jobs, according to figures from Glassdoor. “People don’t see a career path ahead,” says Moses Zonana, senior client partner in the Technology practice at Korn Ferry.
To be sure, the practice is more than just frowned upon by companies. While many do allow side jobs, they prohibit workers from doing work that interferes with their jobs or conflicts with the firm’s own business. To track this, more are investing in electronic monitoring of everything from simple in-house attendance hours to more complex metrics like keystrokes, usage, and tone-of-communication metrics. Indeed, the electronic-monitoring industry has exploded into a $4.8 billion business.
But on a practical level, experts say, most managers struggle to determine the degree to which a second job might be intruding on day-to-day tasks. How do you prevent a worker from taking five-minute breaks to check in on his AI agents? Or prove that a remote employee is logging three hours at midday attending meetings for their side gig? “As long as the individual is doing their job, managers don’t have a leg to stand on,” says HR expert Ron Porter, senior partner at Korn Ferry.
The second job itself is not the problem, say experts. Its repercussions are: The employee stops seeing their day job as their primary opportunity and reserves their best efforts for their other workplace. This proves not to be beneficial for employees, either. By spreading themselves thin between two jobs, they’re “playing whack-a-mole with their own careers instead of being strategic,” says Kate Shattuck, managing partner at Korn Ferry. Succeeding in the current job market often requires full focus.
Experts say firms need, on the one hand, to hold employees more accountable, and, on the other, to recognize how motivation in the corporate world is evolving. One study found that four in ten workers don’t plan to climb the traditional corporate ladder and that seven in ten feel it is “outdated.” Smart firms, experts say, are focusing on offering more skills development to workers to keep them engaged, as well as dropping so-called “peanut-butter” raises that indiscriminately reward the entire workforce, instead of rewarding those who put in extra effort. “The old structure isn’t working,” says Flo Falayi, senior client partner in the Leadership and Executive Development practice at Korn Ferry.
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