Employees outsourcing their jobs? Resolved with WorkTime!

What’s wrong with my best employee???

Andrew P. (the name was changed), a manager of the development department, faced a sudden decline in one of the best employees’ work quality. The issue required an immediate solution, as his poor performance affected the entire department. Thus, the authority decided to implement WorkTime to find out the root cause.

The guy is outsourcing his job!

After reviewing a few reports of Greg’s productivity, the head of the department got a sudden insight: this guy outsourced his own job! Just imagine Andrew’s shock—your talented employee with 8+ years of experience, a strong resume, and a great portfolio is outsourcing tasks to third-party contractors and getting his money paid. It was decided to continue monitoring Greg’s performance to find enough evidence of employee fraud. Fortunately, WorkTime’s features for monitoring Internet & software use, active/idle time, and remote/in-office monitoring helped to see the bigger picture.

Andrew conducted thorough research on how the programmer outsourcing case could affect the company from a long-term perspective.

Let’s have a closer look at the main findings.

Employee fraud uncovered

Financial, security, and image risks

1. The employer invested money and precious time to find the best-fitting candidate for a certain scope of work, considering a list of skills and experience. But the man outsources his own job. Hence, the owner experiences the classic expectations-versus-reality situation because a code looks like it was written literally at the last minute. But if the business owner monitored his workers' productivity with WorkTime, he could easily detect employment outsourcing, avoiding this managerial nightmare.

The company has already spent money expecting cutting-edge quality. Instead, the department faced secondary-money waste due to a supply-chain disruption.

The problem is not only with the programmer. Employees related to this scope of work spent time on evaluation instead of working productively. And what happens next? They have to reject the task after evaluation. Time goes by, money is wasted, but the work remains undone. 2. The low-quality design performed by outsourced workers could easily damage the image of the product. In the long term, it leads to the loss of clients and a decreasing customer satisfaction rate. 3. Constant outsourcing work fraud could also result in severe cybersecurity risks.

A negligent employee can share sensitive data with outsourced staff, including passwords, customer-related details, and any other confidential information.

Outsourcing fraud destroys the team from the inside

Imagine you work hard to boost your professional growth, spend hours improving your skills, gain years of experience, and undergo a variety of challenges. And one day you see your colleague just near you surfing the web, playing games, and entertaining himself almost the whole time, getting his money for outsourcing work done by a ghost contractor. Of course, your motivation will be damaged, rapidly dropping to zero. Many workers discuss topics on Reddit and Quora, mentioning they often hire a subcontractor from Upwork and other platforms to perform their tasks and asking whether it is illegal/punishable. So, productivity monitoring is highly important to find out the employees outsourcing their jobs to react timely. WorkTime is remarkably helpful for building an effective IT team free of unmotivated employees and those who outsource computer programming through monitoring:

• active & idle time;
• visiting websites for remote work outsourcing;
• playing games or shopping online;
• chatting on social media.

When a team observes their colleague outsourcing his work, it results in: 1. Occurrence of the idea that it’s better to search for outsourced employees than come with duties on their own; 2. Creating a toxic work environment; 3. The tarnished reputation of the company.

Unmanaged outsourcing fraud in the company drives away skilled and competent applicants and, vice versa, attracts those who tend to commit employee fraud.

Contractor fraud—a nightmare for managers

Employee fraud cases can significantly affect the manager’s performance evaluation. If the authority detects employees outsourcing their jobs, the question arises: “Do I need such a manager?” Most likely, Andrew would have been fired unless he had uncovered this case before the company faced potential losses or reputation damage.

Why do employees tend to outsource jobs?

• Wrong company culture can increase the probability of employee fraud and a dishonest work approach;
• A lot of pressure on the staff. Ineffective or extremely controlling management makes them feel stressed, unsafe, or unsure of their competence/skills to handle the task. Hence, it can foster the decision to outsource employees.
• Lack of motivation. The worker may not be interested in career growth or skill development. Money is rather the only motivation for such employees, leading to the decision to outsource work.
• Absence of proper training. In this case, the employee is not skilled enough to perform the expected scope of work. That’s why permanent workers are searching for outsourced employees to get out of the predicament.
• Work overload. Sometimes, employees are not able to deal with the volume of work. That’s why they take an outsource-employee-risk to get rid of this burden.

WorkTime protects from outsourcing fraud

Thanks to WorkTime implementation, the scam came to light. Andrew compared Greg’s productivity report with that of other team members. The employee fraud was obvious, as employee monitoring software easily detected the programmer was outsourcing employees: 1. Greg visited Upwork and Fiverr regularly, spent hours on social media, and played computer games. On the contrary, other workers used mainly regular software engineering tools. 2. His total idle time per day was twice as much as his active time compared to Greg’s colleagues, who remained active during their working hours. 3. WorkTime detected logins from third-party IP addresses. The staff members worked only from the office. Even when some employees were remote, they connected to a corporate VPN.

As far as employee monitoring was effective in revealing the signs of employee fraud in time, the company successfully prevented substantial losses and security risks.

The authority decided to give a warning and put Greg back on probation for three months. Besides, Andrew continued monitoring his productivity with WorkTime. The next steps included arranging meetings with employees to warn them about the job outsourcing fraud consequences (including the legal ones) and conducting several training sessions to raise their awareness of cybersecurity issues.

Happy ending with WorkTime :)

Luckily, there is a happy ending for Andrew and his department. Still, it does not mean that every case has such favorable outcomes. Multiple Reddit threads show that outsourcing fraud seems more common than you can even imagine.

Outsourcing fraud is more common than you can even imagine! Reddit is living proof.

The topic was first discussed years ago, but the owners still struggle with employee scams even decades later.

Fraud detection is an inevitable part of a risk management strategy, and WorkTime will be an effective solution to deal with it.

If the company faces employee fraud in any form, it is high time to revise the management approach. Try WorkTime to prevent your business from outsourcing fraud risks with non-invasive monitoring and productivity tracking.