How employers should view their employees’ desire to pursue a side hustle

There are times when what we dismiss today is what matters tomorrow.

In our research into the future of work, a growing group of millennials have told us they want to have more than one job — not over their career lifetimes, but at any one point in time in a day. Specifically, they want a job that lets them work half a day for half the pay, so that they can use the other half of their day to pursue a side hustle.

Why do they want this modern version of a sideline? They want to pursue their passion, such as in arts, sports, startups and hobbies. Having grown up with so many opportunities, interests and talents, they are simply not ready to spend the bulk of their waking hours in just one job.

Many organizations would dismiss this as yet another millennial indulgence, that these young ones are too self-centered, too fearful

of missing out, and too impatient. They had better hunker down, focus on one job, and learn to walk before they run. In work as in life, one cannot have their cake and eat it too.

But dismissing it would be a pity. Because this shift in millennial aspirations today points to a huge possibility for all of us tomorrow. If we can design the side hustle into how we work in organizations, we can attract more new talent, retain more suitable talent, and accommodate more diverse talent, beyond the millennials and across all generations.

Here is how this strategy works.

First, we size jobs down to half a day. That yields two jobs of halfday size. At first pass, it might sound administratively difficult, but this is increasingly feasible because technology is atomizing jobs into tasks. It is unlike job sharing, where the two people sharing a job often find it challenging to tightly take and hand over from each other. Here, we have two half-day but complete jobs — no different from two colleagues in two different jobs working together.

Next, we double the number of hires to do all the jobs. In one fell swoop, we immediately attract and hire double the talent to our organizations. All without an increase to the original wage bill.

There is no increase because we are paying each half-day job half the pay. Extra overheads, if any, would be marginal compared to the wages. And any coordination costs will be tempered, even reduced, by the use of increasingly affordable advanced digital collaboration platforms.

Breaking down jobs into tasks and coordinating through digital platforms might look like we are simply taking advantage of the gig economy. But there is a crucial difference. Instead of outsourcing their jobs, we are helping employees pursue their passion. We have turned the gig economy’s efficiency into an effective talent strategy for millennials.

And the attractiveness of such an arrangement extends to other generations too. While other generations are not into side hustles as much as millennials, neither are they far behind. In the United States, 37 percent of all adults — compared to 50 percent of millennials — have a side hustle. In the United Kingdom, 24 percent in the 45 to 54 age group have one, compared to 35 percent for those in the 16 to 44 age group. As these percentages will grow in the years ahead, designing our organizations around side hustles is a strategy that can attract talent across other generations too.

We can do even more. We can extend the same arrangement to anyone — from any generation — who cannot or do not want to take on a conventional full-time job. These include parents of young children, Gen X workers caring for elderly parents, mid-career professionals exploring career switches, accomplished employees volunteering pro-bono services, and active retirees trying new interests.

They may not be pursuing side hustles for passion. But they all need and want part of their day to do something important. By accommodating the growing and diverse needs of workers across generations, we can cast the talent net even wider. We can become more inclusive in attracting and accommodating talent as a result.

Furthermore, this strategy also helps organizations retain the right talent better. When we hire in small numbers, the margin for error for each hire is small too. That is why there is a growing emphasis on multiple rounds of hiring interviews and tests. However, these interviews and tests — no matter how many rounds we put in place — are notorious for being a weak proxy at best for actual work performance.

Doubling hires increases the margin for error. We can assess more of them on their actual job performance. We can better see who excels, who works well with others, and who is aligned with the corporate culture. We can better assess who to retain, increasing the odds that when they thrive, our organizations will too.

Work in our organizations is a modern urban irony. Economic competition, societal shifts and technological advances have transformed our cities and companies. Employees’ skills, needs, and aspirations have changed, too, yet we continue to rely on anachronistic arrangements of attracting, accommodating and retaining talent.

We need new arrangements. Hence, instead of dismissing them, we can use side hustles to create these new arrangements. We can start with side experiments to see where we can design side hustles into the work to create diverse, inclusive and thriving organizations, not just for millennials, but for everyone. It is time we turn designing for side hustles into our side hustle.