Second jobs | Should HR have a policy on staff side hustles?

Side hustles are no longer a fringe activity. They sit right in the middle of a broader shift in how work is structured, how roles evolve, and how employees see their place in an organization.

But how should an employer deal with this new workplace reality where employees may be juggling more than just their 9 to 5? Does it necessarily signify a lack of commitment? Can it actual be of value in terms of engagement and retention?

For Mark Abbott, CEO of Ninety.io, the conversation starts with the changing nature of work itself.

“Because of the way businesses are changing, there are certain positions we have had that happened last year where we transitioned a part of the way we build software from having a QA group to what’s called an SRE," Abbott explains. "We had a bunch of great engineers who were QA engineers, but the transition made it such that most of their seats were no longer necessary. The reality was less than 10% of those seats really made sense anymore, so we laid off those people, and it sucked. I don’t think I’ve said publicly, we could have done it much better than we did. But there are those dynamics where the nature of things inside an organization no longer makes sense.”